Report by the Tony Blair Institute: “Strong political leadership has always played a decisive role in determining which states succeed and which do not. This is especially true during times of disruption. Decisions made during these periods are often urgent and based on limited information, and their outcomes can have long-lasting effects on a country’s future trajectory.
Today, every leader is facing this scenario. Artificial intelligence will reshape every aspect of our world, from how wars are fought and labour markets operate to how science and research are conducted. Capabilities at the frontier are advancing almost weekly. Leaders are therefore confronting a technology whose consequences will extend across almost every area of government.
Yet while AI’s potential is widely understood, how it will evolve is not. Leaders know they need to act, but what to do and how much to do are often less clear. They must decide how much energy and compute to make available, how to prepare their economies and workforces, how to secure increasingly digital states, and how far to intervene in the development and deployment of the technology. In the West, they must make these choices amid a growing “techlash” against AI – but while doing less might help politically in the short term, it may carry significant long-term impacts on a country’s stability and security.
Political leaders cannot navigate this alone and are highly dependent on the institutions that support them, both to provide the evidence and expertise needed to understand the issues and potential decisions, and to implement those decisions. Yet the challenges that leaders face today often require multiple institutions, departments or regulators to work together, drawing on different strands of evidence and operating under different regulations. This increases the complexity of coordination and delivery. Leaders’ ability to navigate the age of AI will therefore depend on both the quality of the choices they make and on the capacity of the institutions around them to inform and implement those choices.
Technology, and especially AI, will be key to transforming how a state’s institutions work and improving their capacity to deliver. AI can help by enabling government to synthesise information across institutional boundaries, retrieve and apply institutional knowledge, and sustain coordination around shared outcomes. But technology alone is not enough. A new operating model is also needed that can combine political decision-making and authority with institutional expertise and is supported by abundant machine intelligence. Done well, this would give leaders greater capacity to understand the choices before them – and their potential consequences – while giving institutions greater capacity to translate those decisions into action…(More)”.
