Tony Blair Wants Us to Stop Worrying and Embrace AI
9 min read
At first glance, Tony Blair is an unlikely evangelist for the wondrous possibilities of artificial intelligence. As prime minister of Great Britain from 1997 to 2007, he never carried a mobile phone. He didn’t get an official email address until 2003, and even wrote his 2010 memoir, A Journey, in longhand. But now this ex-politician finds himself one of the most prominent advocates for artificial intelligence outside Silicon Valley. He believes that AI will create as big a shift in our lives as the Industrial Revolution did, and that governments have been too slow to recognize the technology’s potential. It is a fitting coda to a career characterized by trying to win over skeptical audiences.
As the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Blair saw his job as trying to reconcile the left to the inevitable triumph of capitalism over socialism. One of his first acts was to persuade the party to drop its commitment to nationalized industry, and as prime minister, he welcomed private contractors into the state-funded National Health Service. Trying to synthesize Silicon Valley’s most hyped technology with the public sector’s resistance to change is a classic Blairite project.
Now, after decades spent thinking about how governments work, he is utterly convinced that AI will transform the world. “Government is all about process, and AI is all about automating process,” he told me when I visited the London headquarters of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. And if we ever reach artificial general intelligence—an AI that can outperform humans on most tasks—the effect will be “just massive; everything is going to change.”
Like many journalists, I view AI with a default level of skepticism, even suspicion. The wide eyes and hungry wallets of its champions make me twitch, and I wonder if these new god-kings truly understand that running a country is far more complicated than raising Series A funding for your internet-enabled juice machine. Sometimes, the Californian enthusiasm for innovation can blur into naivete. Blair recently appeared on a podcast hosted by the Substack author Dwarkesh Patel, during which he was asked—I’m paraphrasing, but only just—why politicians shouldn’t put the private sector in charge of education and health care, because businesses are clearly superior to the state. Blair was left to explain, delicately, that “you can’t just hand everything over to the private sector, because in the end, the public will expect the government to take account of the public interest.” In other words, if Jeff Bezos or Sam Altman screwed up our welfare system, we couldn’t vote them out and give Elon Musk a try instead. What many citizens want from the state is not sexy innovation, but boring dependability.
Still, when technological changes sweep through society, governments can either embrace or resist them—and unless Britain and other countries step up, big choices about the future will be made for them by a handful of private companies. That’s why Blair has positioned himself as the bridge between the utopian dreamers of the Bay Area and the overstretched civil servants who actually have to make cumbersome bureaucracies work—between the people who are excited that AI might take your job, and the people who will have to manage the unemployment line if it does.
The Tony Blair Institute has received $375 million in funding from Oracle chairman Larry Ellison’s foundation, among others. (Blair does not take a salary.) Where Blair is undoubtedly right is that tech giants now dominate the world. When he came to power in 1997, the most valuable company was General Electric, and tech firms held only three spots in the top 15. Today, the picture has flipped, with Microsoft, Apple, and the chipmaker Nvidia vying for the top spot—and all of them worth far more than GE was a quarter century ago. Wasn’t the internet equally transformative during his time in power? “It changed the way people interact with each other and all of that,” he said. “But it didn’t offer, for example, possibilities of doing drug discovery completely differently.” (He means Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold program, which uses machine learning to model protein structures, and therefore suggest molecules that might merit further research by pharmaceutical companies.) The internet, he said, “made government significantly more efficient, but not transformatively more efficient.” As for privacy concerns, he brushed them aside: “What is your most precious data?” he asked me. Probably my medical and financial records. He shrugged. “You already give that to people.”
Blair has another reason for being interested in AI: He thinks it could boost economic growth, saving the British government from billions of pounds in tax hikes. In the ’90s and early 2000s, Blair and his chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, were able to redistribute money to the needy because of the strong economy—they slashed poverty among children and pensioners. “Basically, the rule was, if growth is reasonably significantly over 2 percent, life’s fantastic,” he told me. “If it’s much under 2 percent, it’s terrible. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but in government, that was more or less how it was.” Last year, though, British economic growth was an estimated 0.1 percent, and it is not predicted to reach 2 percent again until 2027.
Blair also believes that AI could fix the many friction points that make interacting with the state so painful. Artificial intelligence could be used to prefill forms for welfare claimants, he believes, and to provide natural-language support for those struggling to access benefits, as well as personalized tutoring to school pupils.
In the health service, AI might provide early diagnoses of degenerative eye conditions and breast tumors; one London hospital is already using machine learning to automate X-ray scans of children’s bones to see if they are developing properly. “There are virtually limitless possibilities going to be opened up in health,” Blair said. “For new treatments, better diagnosis, you [being] able to take much more charge of your own health. You will have an AI nurse, probably an AI doctor, just as you’ll have an AI tutor.”
As a politician, Blair always exuded conviction—he was often caricatured as an evangelist, and eventually some voters complained that his charm had duped them into accepting his evidence for the Iraq War. Talking breezily about large language models and massive open online courses, he is totally convincing. Yet as he spoke, I could hear the dismissive tabloid phrasing forming in my mind: Tony Blair wants to replace the health service with chatbots.
If the AI revolution happens on the scale suggested by its greatest champions, it will undoubtedly create losers. Research by the Tony Blair Institute suggests that “adoption of AI across the public-sector workforce could save around one-fifth of workforce time at a comparatively low cost.” Hmm. Workforce time, or overall head count? If I were reading that as a 50-something civil servant, the future would sound less exciting than terrifying.
But Blair prefers not to fixate on the downsides. As a politician, he has always been defined by optimism. He celebrated his election victory with a song called “Things Can Only Get Better,” and was briefly popular with the artists, fashion designers, and pop stars of the Cool Britannia era. (The Spice Girls even asked him to be in the video for “Wannabe.” He declined.)
When he left office, though, his otherwise positive record was tarnished by his decision to join George W. Bush in the invasion of Iraq. Blair spent several years advising unpleasant authoritarians and trying to bring peace to the Middle East. His Labour Party fell under Jeremy Corbyn, who had won the party leadership as the anti-Blair: uncompromising in his socialism, skeptical of NATO and Western military interventions, and a believer in a big state supported by higher taxes on the rich.
The Brexit vote in 2016 led Blair to reengage with British politics at a time when he felt both the left and right had made serious errors. The decision to hold the referendum, he told me, “was all about the psychodrama within the Conservative Party rather than the country. And I think that’s honestly not a politically partisan thing to say.”
Blair saw Brexit as an expression of nostalgia—a concession that Britain’s best days were behind it. “That must never be true for a country, and you can never think like that,” he said. Today, he enjoys working in developing countries whose leaders feel adamantly that things, for them, can only get better. “There is an introspection about Britain that I think is worrying, and of which Brexit was a part.”
And so, in an extraordinary reinvention, Blair decided to claw himself back from persona non grata to elder statesman. In September 2016, three months after the referendum, he wound up most of his commercial ventures, and after nearly a decade in the well-remunerated wilderness, he founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. “He is no longer Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but Prime Minister of Tony Blair Inc.,” my former Atlantic colleague Tom McTague wrote last year.
The institute, which now employs nearly 1,000 people, has offices in Accra, Abu Dhabi, and San Francisco. The day before we met, Blair had hosted an AI summit featuring Demis Hassabis, a co-founder of DeepMind, Britain’s most influential AI firm; former prime ministers of Italy and Finland; the newly minted Labour health minister, Wes Streeting; and will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, who is now a tech entrepreneur. (If you ever want to have an out-of-body experience, may I recommend listening to your childhood prime minister explain how the “My Humps” guy now co-presents a radio show with an AI.)
Blair’s image rehab has been helped by the transformation of his political party under Keir Starmer, the new prime minister. In the past four years, Labour has moved back to the Blairite center on taxes, foreign policy, and the use of private companies in the health service—and on July 4, it won a Blair-size majority as a result. Like Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s other transformational leader of the past half century, Blair desperately wants to move forward, and he is not hobbled by introspection. Did Labour’s landslide leave Blair thinking about his own victory in 1997, I ask—or perhaps make him reappraise it? “It’s an interesting question,” he said. “I haven’t really thought about it. I suppose the answer must be no.”
In Britain today, his opinion matters again. Our interview was carefully scheduled for after the election, to avoid the risk of headlines that would distract from Starmer’s ultracautious strategy. His new influence means the right-wing press has already begun to mutter about him being the power behind Starmer’s throne.
But Blair seems to have moved on to a more existential matter: trying to reassure people that AI will help more than it hurts. As he and I speak, investors are throwing money at buzzy companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, while everyone else is scrambling to catch up with them. Experts who believe that an artificial superintelligence is possible, or even imminent, argue about whether that superintelligence will wipe out humanity. AI is quickly insinuating itself into our lives. It has already changed my workday—I tell Blair that I will feed our interview into an AI transcription service, which saves me hours of work that were once a routine part of my job. Still, today’s generative AI has “hallucinations,” dreaming up fake quotes or citations. That’s what people fear: supposedly infallible cutting-edge computer systems going awry, and users’ complaints being dismissed.
Two years ago, Blair was sitting on a stage in the Bahamas with Bill Clinton and the crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried. (Clinton and Blair were in suits; Bankman-Fried, inevitably, wore a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers.) SBF is now in jail for fraud, his billion-dollar company reduced to a smoking ruin. People were cynical about bitcoin, I told Blair. And they were right.
“Yeah,” he replied, dismissively. “But you know, there were a thousand people who were engaged in the Industrial Revolution and turned out to be fraudsters or shysters, or their inventions didn’t work, or the thing broke. When the Wright Brothers were flying the first planes, they crashed them all.” The key questions about AI, he told me, are: “In the broad sweep, is it going to improve things? And will it make a big difference? And I think it will.”
His vision of AI is one that frees humans to do the things only humans can do, that saves governments from the trap of low growth and high taxes, that remakes the state to be as forward-looking as the tech giants that dominate the stock market. That vision is optimistic, unburdened by too much doubt and introspection, and biased toward action: in other words, extremely Blairite.
