About this episode

Dominic Cummings discusses the misalignment of political institutions with technological advancements and the impending crisis.

Dominic Cummings is the former director of Vote Leave, former chief adviser in Downing Street, and the man most likely to tell you, with no apparent pleasure, exactly which official in which committee killed the thing you wanted to build. He arrives not as a Westminster memoirist but as a diagnostician. The post-1945 order — UN, NATO, WTO, WHO, IMF, the European project — was built for a world that no longer exists, and his frame for the whole conversation is brutally simple: the institutions and the ideas gradually drift out of alignment with reality, and then you have crisis. We are, on this account, somewhere in the gap between the drift and the crisis. He starts with the technology because that is where the gap is widest. The people who predicted the most success for machine learning have turned out to be the most accurate predictors of the future, the straight lines on the graphs have stubbornly kept being true, and the political world is doing what it always does, which is practise deliberate blindness to the whole thing. Stack the exponentials together — frontier AI, democratised biological engineering, models improving month on month, and what he calls completely crackers…

People in this episode

Hosts: Tom Ough, Calum Drysdale

Guest: Dominic Cummings

Topics covered

• politics
• technology
• future
• crisis
• machine learning
• regulation
• growth

Keywords

• Dominic Cummings
• Vote Leave
• technology
• politics
• machine learning
• regulation
• crisis
• China
• California
• Europe

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Vote Leave, Downing Street, UN, NATO, WTO, WHO, IMF, European project

Places: China, California, Europe

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