Andy Burnham has accused former Labour Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair of failing to understand what's going on in people's lives and underestimating the impact of inequality. Sir Tony used a 5,600 word essay to argue the Labour government had no coherent plan for the country and had introduced policies that had held back business. He urged Labour not to move to the left and to embrace the radical centre instead. But Burnham, who is widely expected to challenge Sir Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership if he wins a by-election next month, told the Observer Sir Tony doesn't mention inequality once in his critique of where the Labour government has gone wrong. If you don't get how that's driving politics now, if you are not rooting your analysis in the fact that people are unable to live and that things that were taken for granted are no longer affordable, then you are not understanding what's going on, said the mayor of Greater Manchester.

Tony Blair: 'As we have seen with AI, it is the countries that have the infrastructure and capital for scale that capture technology's economic and strategic benefits.' Tony Blair: 'As we have seen with AI, it is the countries that have the infrastructure and capital for scale that capture technology's economic and strategic benefits.' 'History won't forgive us' if UK falls behind in quantum computing race, says Tony Blair Tony Blair has said "history won't forgive us" if the UK falls behind in the race to harness quantum computing, a frontier technology predicted to trigger the next wave of breakthroughs in everything from drug design to climate modelling. The former British Labour prime minister, whose thinktank and consultancy, the Tony Blair Institute, is backed by tech industry leaders including the Oracle founder, Larry Ellison, warned: "The country risks failing to convert its leadership in quantum research." In a report calling for a national strategy for quantum computing, Blair and William Hague, a former Conservative party leader, compared the situation to the recent history of artificial intelligence, where the UK was responsible for important research breakthroughs but then ceded power to other countries, including the US, leading to a scramble to build "sovereign" AI capacity.

Were you to board an aeroplane piloted by a man who has never previously sat in a cockpit, you'd be alarmed. Were you to face surgery by a woman with no medical qualifications, you'd be frightened. Politics is the one profession that can put someone in a position of great power and responsibility without any prior experience or demonstration of ability. "It's bizarre," Tony Blair says. "In any other walk of life, that doesn't happen." When he became prime minister in 1997 he was in his early forties and an absolute neophyte at governing. He was much better at it, he believes, towards the end of his decade at No 10 than at the outset. So he's written a book about the dos and the don'ts of leadership "because government is a science as well as an art". In the first flush of taking power, leaders "listen eagerly" because they grasp that they know little or nothing about governing.

A new joint report entitled A New National Purpose, which explores how the UK can harness innovative technologies to meet future challenges, has recently been published by Tony Blair and William Hague. The "cross-party" report argues that we are currently undergoing a new form of Industrial Revolution "as developments in artificial intelligence (AI), biotech, climate tech and other fields begin to change our economic and social systems". It calls for policymakers to mitigate the consequent threats whilst embracing opportunities. Several of its proposals touch upon the convergence of law and technology, and we will consider some of these aspects below. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Tony Blair's foiled aspirations to introduce digital ID during his premiership, much of the press attention has focused on the report's call for the government to "provide a secure, private, decentralised digital-ID system for the benefit of both citizens and businesses".

Over the past few years, inspired by the promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have seen enterprises embrace the first big challenge of AI: building it in the first place. There has been significant adoption of machine learning (ML) and AI in enterprises, aided by the broad availability of solutions for data preparation, model development and training, and model deployment. Now, however, we are seeing enterprises shift their focus from getting these basic building blocks in place to tackling the next big challenge: how do you drive real, sustainable business value with AI? Answering this question requires solving a whole new set of problems. It requires solving the challenge of AI Quality. At TruEra, we believe that solving the problem of AI Quality is key to driving and preserving business value.

Since the 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically connected, global village, thanks to the net. So why are the utopian visions of 40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today? Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village. Barbrook, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Westminster, has been researching this topic for more than four years. What he wants is to show how ideology is used to warp time.