Ahead of the publication of his book about leadership – definitely not aimed at Keir Starmer – the former prime minister talks about relinquishing power, why he’s not fazed about a second Trump term and being an AI evangelist Were you to board an aeroplane piloted by a man who has never previously sat in a cockpit, you’d be alarmed. Were you to face surgery by a woman with no medical qualifications, you’d be frightened. Politics is the one profession that can put someone in a position of great power and responsibility without any prior experience or demonstration of ability. “It’s bizarre,” Tony Blair says. “In any other walk of life, that doesn’t happen.” When he became prime minister in 1997 he was in his early forties and an absolute neophyte at governing. He was much better at it, he believes, towards the end of his decade at No 10 than at the outset. So he’s written a book about the dos and the don’ts of leadership “because government is a science as well as an art”. In the first flush of taking power, leaders “listen eagerly” because they grasp that they know little or nothing about governing. In the second stage, they know enough to think they know everything and become impatient with listening. Hubris becomes a danger, inviting nemesis. “You’ve got some experience, but your experience makes you believe that you know more than you actually do. And that’s the risk. That’s why I say stage two is the most difficult and many people never get to stage three.” Maturity comes with the realisation that what they know is not the sum total of political knowledge. Once again, “with more humility”, they listen and learn. Continue reading...

Tony Blair’s powerful thinktank asked ChatGPT how AI might affect public sector jobs. Critics say the results were … wonky • Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article here What will AI do to employment? It is, after “will it kill us all?”, the most important question about the technology, and it’s remarkably hard to pin down – even as the frontier moves from science fiction to reality. At one end of the spectrum is the slightly Pollyannaish claim that new technology simply creates new jobs; at the other, fears of businesses replacing entire workforces with AI tools. Sometimes, the dispute is less about end state and more about speed of the transition: an upheaval completed in a few years is destructive for those caught in the middle of it, in a way that one which takes two decades may be survivable. More than 40 per cent of tasks performed by public-sector workers could be partly automated by a combination of AI-based software, for example machine-learning models and large-language models, and AI-enabled hardware, ranging from AI-enabled sensors to advanced robotics. The government will need to invest in AI technology, upgrade its data systems, train its workforce to use the new tools and cover any redundancy costs associated with early exits from the workforce. Under an ambitious rollout scheme, we estimate these costs equate to £4bn per year on average over this parliamentary term. Continue reading...