544. How Trump Is Weaponising AI and Martial Arts at the White House
6/17/202649 min
Has Britain become a “vassal” state, dangerously dependent on the US for our most vital national security capabilities? What does Trump’s martial arts birthday event on the White House lawn tell us about the “banalisation” of his presidency in politics and the media? Will Alastair u-turn on his boycott of the World Cup and travel to the Americas if Scotland go far in the controversial competition?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsRory Stewart· Host0:01
Last week, the President of the United States did something that no technology company would ever have done. He took the most capable artificial intelligence that America's leading lab had ever built, and he stopped it at the border on national security grounds, which means the latest frontier model from Anthropic is now, in effect, a weapon. Americans get it, but the rest of us, allies included, get whatever version they're willing to let out. Now, I've spent a lot of the last few months trying to tell anyone who'll listen that this couldn't be ruled out, and then being told politely that I was catastrophizing, that the Americans would never do this. So what if the central technology of the next century, in other words, the technology on which everything will depend, our government, our defense, our economy, turns out to be something we can only rent, something which America can withdraw whenever it wants? Is Britain, is Europe still a power that governs itself, or are we just quietly discovering that we've become a vassal? And if it's the second, then what do we do about it? And the answer I've come to believe is something very radical. So that's what I want to work through today. What actually is the threat? What are we going to do about it? All that and more to come in today's episode of The Rest is Politics question time.
Alastair Campbell· Host1:25
This episode is brought to you by Ooh! Energy.
Rory Stewart· Host1:27
Now, moving home has a way of revealing