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While waiting in Milan airport this week, I stood aside to let someone in a wheelchair roll past. Looking down, I saw that it was Rishi Sunak, Britain’s former prime minister, who injured his leg skiing a couple of months ago. The Italian lady next to me whispered: “Isn’t that whatsisname?”
Brits used to mock Italians for the frequency with which they changed prime ministers, and the impossibility of remembering which one was which. Now Britain has become a byword for transience at the top. This week’s cover story there asks, of the man who is almost certain to be the country’s seventh national leader in a decade,
“Andy who?”
Andy Burnham, a charismatic former mayor of Greater Manchester, has plenty of experience asking the central government for money, but when he is prime minister
he will have to learn to say “no”.
Britain desperately needs faster growth;
Mr Burnham offers few ideas for stoking it.
He did a good job of improving Manchester’s buses, but we fear that may not be adequate preparation for the job of governing a fractious, discontented country. We hope we are wrong.
Our cover story in the rest of the world is on
the backlash against artificial intelligence.
Strangely, it is strongest in America, the country where the technology is most advanced. Its most obvious manifestation is
opposition to new data centres,
which protesters accuse of hogging electricity. But it goes much deeper than that, as I found on a trip to Washington and Philadelphia earlier this month. Republicans and Democrats alike
fear that AI will disrupt people’s lives,
their jobs and even their children’s future romantic attachments. They have never seen a technology advance so fast, and by a huge margin they want to slow it down and regulate it better.
AI models’ values are very different
from those of most people, The Economist’s data team has found. Big AI firms are
hiring philosophers
to help make their models wiser, which may help. We suggest principles that governments should apply to reduce the risk of catastrophic harm from AI and to deal with the social and economic consequences as they become clearer. But there is a risk that, as the topic becomes politically explosive, politicians will impose clumsy rules, making it harder to reap the technology’s vast potential benefits, or allowing China, which is only
a few months behind,
to get to superintelligence first and become the world’s dominant power.
On this week’s Insider, we discuss the “Orange Wave” in Latin America. In little more than a year seven Latin American countries have held presidential elections—and right-wingers have won all seven. Barring Mexico and Brazil, nearly every sizeable country in the region now has a leader who either courts Donald Trump or sounds like him. Zanny Minton Beddoes, our editor-in-chief, hosts a panel of colleagues, including me, to examine what this means for prosperity, crime and the drug trade. You can
watch the episode now. | 
