Who Really Benefits from AI and Will Data Centres Decide the Midterms?

**Rory Stewart** (0:01)
We're entering what I think is one of the strangest technology stories in the world, and it's all about artificial intelligence. The companies building the AI systems are becoming some of the most valuable institutions ever created. They're starting to look less like tech companies, and more like huge centers of economic and political power. But at the same time, the systems themselves are beginning to behave in ways that we were once paranoid about. They're beginning to deceive their ownness, mount cyber attacks, act in unpredictable ways, and break out of their boundaries. And there's a third story. Across America and elsewhere, communities are rebelling against the physical infrastructure of AI. It's becoming not just a technology that people use, but something whose costs people can see, and increasingly something that people can organize against. So for years, the central question was, what can these systems do? We're now moving, I think, into a different question. Who gets to decide what they're allowed to do? The companies building them, the governments trying to regulate them, the communities living beside them, or eventually, the systems themselves.
Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

**Alastair Campbell** (1:17)
And with me, Alastair Campbell. And we're going to talk about artificial intelligence, and we're going to talk about the catastrophic events in Nepal, and possibly, we're going to make a link.

**Rory Stewart** (1:27)
So Alastair, I think this could be a chance for a bit of agreeable disagreement, but also maybe a way, because I suspect in the end, we probably don't disagree as much as you hope, but maybe a way of bringing out some of the problems that politicians are going to face. To really talk about AI is a sort of, I don't know, 10-hour conversation because you're talking about what these machines are, what they can do, what they might be able to do in the future, what kind of benefits they could bring, what kind of risks they could bring, who controls them, is it these companies, is it the US, is it China, and then what the consequences might be for society, and then what do we do about it? Then somewhere at the bottom of that, the data centers, which are a very important part of what allows them to operate in the question of where they're built.
I just wanted to start with that because I think it's, for my money, probably the most difficult political question that anyone's facing and something that at least in my experience, this sort of thing politicians really struggle with because I guess many, many, many members of parliament in Britain, many congresspeople and senators, firstly, don't really understand the technology, don't really understand how these things work, what they can do, what they can't do. And they will be hearing from experts, very credible experts, people saying completely contradictory things. You will have found this, I think, which is that you'll have friends who'll say to you, listen, I studied computer science or I'm a physicist, I can tell you this is all bullshit, or you'll have other people saying, listen, I've studied this stuff, it's terrifying what it can do.

**Alastair Campbell** (2:59)
I think we are going to disagree quite a lot because I think you are fundamentally pro-AI. I know you get criticized for not being pro-AI enough by the sort of the tech masters of the universe. And I've been very wanting to be positive, but I've been getting more and more negative. And I think the thing is with most policies and with most issues, it takes time to work out the answer to this fundamental question, which is who benefits. When the AI hype first began, and we heard of things like it's going to find new medical cures, we're going to be able to deliver the best of Western medicine to the poorest parts of Africa, we're going to be able to give educational access to people who've got no other material resource. I thought, I'm completely in, okay? And then only last week, turn on the BBC News, and there was a story about an operation that doctors were getting AI to do because it was on a brain tumor, so close to a guy's eye, that it would have been an enormous risk if the human doctors had carried it out. And then, so I've been broadly up for it. And then also, Trump Derangement Syndrome, the fact that Trump at one point was against it, meant, yeah, well, I'm probably going to be in favor. Okay. He has shifted.
And his shift is because he's seen the financial benefits particularly for himself and his family, also for America. And of course, with Trump on side, it's meant that the AI hype was stronger than ever, but they didn't feel they had to sell it anymore. The administration comes on board and the tech bros suddenly think, well, we don't need to worry, the investment's going to come now. Here it comes. So they've stopped selling it. Then you have the economic consequences. Andrew Bailey, I don't know if you saw on the front page of some of the papers today, governor of the Bank of England warning the G20 leaders, he's worried about a severe downturn. If this turns out to be a bubble that burst. So on the question, if I can give a little explainer, Rory, one of your famous explainers, why I think this basic question, who is it for and who is it helping, is what is now turning against AI.