The Monocle Minute

The UK’s prime minister Rishi Sunak will open the country’s Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit today. Sunak has invited private and public sector leaders to the conference to discuss the importance of balancing innovation with safety in artificial intelligence (AI). It will be a closely watched and frustratingly private event held at Bletchley Park, a centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. Since ChatGPT’s release 11 months ago, the idea of AI has exploded into boardrooms and living rooms alike. AI systems are increasingly affordable, prevalent and easy to use. Leaders, including former Google chairman Eric Schmidt, increasingly consider AI to be a new, general-purpose technology capable of transforming human civilisation. That’s why Downing Street is getting involved – and it’s not alone in its efforts. On Monday, the US government announced a sweeping executive order on AI. But both Biden and Sunak trail behind the European Commission’s AI Act, a GDPR-style super-regulation that aims to mitigate the technology’s risk to humans.

If the UK wishes to be a force in AI, then the summit needs to focus on aligning major labs, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic, over matters such as job displacement. The risks from this new technology are as significant as its rewards; losing control of cutting-edge, autonomous AI could be disastrous. Since much of the sector’s innovation happens privately, companies should also be more transparent about what they are developing to mitigate any potential downsides.

The Sunak administration won’t be able to take the AI trophy overnight, however, as nearly all AI developments currently take place in the US. The savvy thing to do would be to promote the UK as an innovation-friendly alternative to the EU when, and if, AI companies want to expand operations outside the US. While the best time for this summit was probably at the beginning of AI innovation, the second-best time is now.


Ramsay Brown is the CEO of AI trust company Mission Control AI and a senior research associate at the University of Cambridge. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

The first US-made F-16 combat aircraft that The Netherlands promised to donate to Ukraine will arrive in Romania’s training centre within two weeks, according to Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte. Denmark, Norway and Belgium have also announced that they will donate F-16s to Ukraine but the exact date of the transfers remains unknown.

“Since the beginning of the war, Ukrainians have shown the world that they’re very quick with their studies,” Lada L Roslycky, founder of Black Trident, a defence and security consulting group in Kyiv, tells The Monocle Minute. “It’s important to deliver the aircraft as soon as possible and remove the technical blocks that stand in the way of training pilots.”

The 10th Beijing Xiangshan Forum, China’s largest annual show of military diplomacy, wrapped up yesterday, having hosted delegations from 90 countries and international bodies. Perhaps its most significant attendee was top US Department of Defense official Xanthi Carras. The fact that China invited America at all – and that Washington accepted – suggests a willingness by both countries to re-establish more cordial relations.

On Monday, Beijing also took the unusual step of honouring two US Second World War veterans who had served in the Flying Tigers, an aviation unit that fought against imperial Japan. These warm gestures anticipate a tentatively scheduled meeting in November between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in San Francisco, which would mark their first face-to-face encounter since last year’s G20 summit in Bali. Against the backdrop of conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, a return to meaningful dialogue between the world’s two most powerful nations is sorely needed.

Hiroshi Sugimoto is famed for mixing wit and commentary with exquisitely tuned craftsmanship and bold conceptual thinking. The Japanese artist is the subject of a new exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery. We speak to Sugimoto, plus the show’s curator, Ralph Rugoff, and the director of photography gallery Black Box Projects, Kathlene Fox-Davies.