Weekend Box #113: What's the Rush, Rish? & more
Welcome to The Weekend Box, Audley’s round-up of interesting or obscure political, business, and cultural news from around the world.
At the end of every busy week in Westminster, ministerial private offices ask their departments to submit papers to the ‘weekend box’ for Ministers and Secretaries of State to catch up with over the weekend. Similarly, we would like to send you into the weekend with a few stories to catch up with at your leisure.
So, let’s delve inside The Weekend Box.
Rishi Sunak needs to win the election. Keir Starmer doesn’t.
This may sound odd but it’s the key point. To stay in power, Sunak needs to eek out a Conservative majority because no other party will prop him up. The DUP and Liberal Democrats have been there before and learned the lesson. They won’t do it again. So while Keir Starmer can become PM in a minority government with the support of smaller parties, nothing less than a majority will do for the Conservatives.
Universal swing is dead.
You will hear people say Labour needs a bigger swing than Tony Blair achieved just to secure a majority of one. Don’t let this fool you. Universal swing is dead. The evidence from recent by-elections and the local elections in May is that tactical voting is rife. People are literally going out of their way to vote for the candidate most likely to beat the Conservative. The overall vote share doesn’t matter as much as where the votes fall.
Scotland’s coming home.
Tony Blair won big in Scotland. Keir Starmer is poised to do the same. It’s hard to see how Labour could secure a majority without Scotland – but the implosion of the SNP has come at just the right time for Keir Starmer. All the signs are that for Labour in this election, Scotland’s coming home.
These are the fundamentals. Everything else is noise. Barring a disaster, Keir Starmer is going to be prime minister because he doesn’t even need to win the election to get the keys to Number 10. And it would take a collapse of epic proportions to lose it from here.
As AI becomes increasingly present in our lives, so does the tension between realization of its positive potential and concern that it might present threats to our livelihoods, or even our existence. This tension exists within the organizations that are pioneering AI’s applications, so it’s concerning if leaders like Open AI’s Sam Altman seem to pay lip service to ethical or safety concerns, or reveal the hubristic ‘move fast and break things’ mentality for which Big Tech is infamous.
Altman was raising eyebrows again this week, after Scarlet Johansson alleged that Open AI had chosen a voice for a demo of one of its new AI assistant characters, Sky, that sounded suspiciously like her. ‘Her,’ in fact: the AI assistant is startlingly similar to Johansson’s character in the 2013 film ‘Her,’ in which she played… an AI persona. Altman even invited the comparison, tweeting ‘her’ on X on the day of the demo.
Johansson then revealed, while expressing her ‘disbelief', that Altman had asked her to use her voice, that she had declined, yet they ran the demo anyway. Cue awkward questions and unconvincing denials by Altman. Copying an actor’s voice without permission is not a good omen for the future of AI.
More ominously, the leaders of Open AI’s ‘superalignment team,’ tasked with ensuring that AI stays in its intended lane and doesn’t harm humanity, resigned. Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike left, with Leike saying: “safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products.” Their departure follows a string of others from the safety team since Altman survived an unsuccessful attempt in November to remove him by those who had concerns about Altman’s conduct and motives.
Without due commitment and resources, who will ensure that Open AI and its competitors keep their creations harnessed for the common good?
