Episode 3: Tony Blair, Executive Chairman of the Institute for Global Change

On today’s episode we sit down with Executive Chairman of the
Institute for Global Change and former Prime Minister of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland, Tony Blair. In a wide ranging
interview from the impacts of Brexit to Artificial Intelligence,
Tony Blair, talking to Tarah Ferguson, expresses concern that
Government officials have yet to find an effective way to connect
with those driving the technological revolution saying “the change
makers, the people engaged in making these huge changes with such
impact on how we live, work and think; and the policy makers, those
who are going to have to produce the governance and regulation and
work out the impact of it all, are not in a proper dialogue
together.” Calling for a Department of Digital and Technology, he
says it should be staffed and run in a very different way to
traditional government departments. It should bring together
experts in technology and government and create a faster
interchange between the private/tech sector and government, getting
rid of old rules that don’t apply today and will help overcome the
lack of understanding of the tech sector amongst policy-makers,
which is predominantly a generational issue. In November 2017, the
Tony Blair Institute, published a paper entitled Technology for the
many: A public policy platform for a better, fairer future. The
premise of the paper was to set out the challenges and the
opportunities for governments in the face of rapid technological
change and to highlight the numerous ways in which government can
use technology for good, resulting in positive outcomes for the
many. On today’s episode, I sit down with Tony, to learn more about
the catalyst for the paper, why he believes government needs to
start adopting technology now more than ever, and his thoughts on
the biggest risks facing people in the tech sector and what that
could mean for public policy in the UK.
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