Tony Blair

You had to accelerate all of that.

That was done, to be fair, but then you have to distribute it.

That is also a major challenge.

I think part of the problem was that governments weren't sure where to go for advice.

You know, they had scientific advice, they had medical advice, but then they had to balance that with the needs of their economy and the anxiety a lot of people had that when you were having a large shutdown, that they were going to be hugely disadvantaged, as indeed people were.

And I think one of the things that COVID did was for the developing world,

I think there's an argument for saying for the developing world that lockdowns probably did more harm than good.

Well, what the private sector can do is to input into the public sector.

And so, you know, in COVID, I mean, the countries that handed vaccine procurement, well, not so much vaccine procurement, vaccine production, if they handed it to the private sector and said, run with it, right, those are the countries that did best, frankly.

And I think, especially with something as technically complex as AI, you are going to rely on the private sector for the facts of what is happening and to be able to establish the options about what you do.

But in the end, the government or the public sector will have to decide which option to take.

And the thing that makes governing difficult is I always say to people, when you decide, you divide.

The moment you take a decision on a public policy question, there are always two ways you can go.

With COVID, you could have decided to do what Sweden did and let the disease run, pretty much.

You could have decided to do what China did and lock down completely.

But then what happened with China was...

Once you got the Omicron variant and it became obvious you weren't going to be able to keep COVID out, they didn't have the facility or the agility to go and change policy.

But these policy questions are hard, and it's very easy with hindsight to say, yeah, you should have done this, should have done that.

But I think if this happened in relation to AI...

you would absolutely depend on the people who were developing AI to be able to know what decision you should take.