Tony Blair

challenge, which is that though politics at one level is very crude, right?

You're shaking hands, kissing babies, making speeches, devising slogans, attacking your opponents, right?

It's quite a crude business.

When it comes to policy, it's a really intellectual business, politics.

And that's why people often, if they've only got ambitions...

then they haven't really undertaken the intellectual exercise to turn those into policies.

Policies are hard.

It's hard to work out what the right policy is.

If you take this AI revolution, and I think we're living through a period of massive change.

This is the biggest technological change since the Industrial Revolution, for sure.

For political leaders today to understand that, to work out what the right policy is, to access the opportunities, mitigate the risks, regulate it, this is really difficult work.

And so what happens a lot of the time is that people are elected on the basis they are changemakers because they've articulated a general vision for change.

But when you then come to, okay, what does that really mean in specific terms?

That's where the hard work hasn't been done.

And if you don't do that hard work and really dig deep, then what you end up with, as I say, are just, they're ambitions and they just remain ambitions.

Right now, definitely not.

And one of the things that we do as an institute, one of the reasons I'm here actually in Silicon Valley is to try and

bridge the gap between what I call the changemakers and the policymakers.

Because the policymakers, a lot of the time, just fear the changemakers.

And the changemakers, a lot of the time, don't want really anything to do with the policymakers because they just think they get in the way.