С отчетным докладом
Город-государство Лондонский сити посетил премьер-министр Великобритании.
Борис Джонсон выступил с отчетным докладом на банкете лорда-мэра.
Речь целиком опубликована здесь.
My Lord Mayor, My Late Lord Mayor, Your Grace, My Lord Chancellor, Your Excellencies, My Lords, Aldermen, Sheriffs, Chief Commoner, ladies and gentlemen.
If I seem a little hoarse tonight, it’s nothing more epidemiologically serious than the well-known consequences of sending an 18 month old child to nursery.
Fourteen days ago this country hosted the biggest gathering of world leaders since the foundation of the UN at the end of the Second World War. In fact it was far bigger: there were more than 120 heads of state and government.
There has never been anything like it in our history. They came in such numbers not just because Glasgow is the place for a party, though clearly it is - glad we’ve got a good contingent of Glaswegians here tonight - not just because they wanted to be in the UK in November, famed for its good weather though it is....
But I tell you this: I have been watching politics a long time and human nature, and I know when a tipping point is reached.
We signalled the global death knell for the fossil fuel driven internal combustion engine, and the developed world has started to wake up to its responsibilities...
Perhaps we were also helped in Glasgow by a collective sense of embarrassment at the way internationalism failed us during Covid: the squabbles about PPE, the crazy decisions of some countries, naming no names, to try to stop the export of vaccines to others, something we were victims of at the start of this year...
And in that bee-like way of human beings we all started to swarm around the same intellectual hive...
Because it is clear that some countries are simply not going to evolve towards free market democracies and we should be clear eyed about that. We have to deal with it, we have to manage it, we must have relations that are as friendly and pragmatic as possible.
But the consequence is that we work ever more closely with those who do share our values and instincts.
So when we say that we support the sovereignty and integrity of Ukraine, that is not because we want to be adversarial to Russia, or that we want in some way strategically to encircle or undermine that great country.
And never let it be forgotten, in this season of remembrance, that it was Russian blood that enabled us to defeat Nazism...
The other day I met Demis Hassabis of Deep Mind, which is an extraordinary company located near King’s Cross, and he told me about AI which is not a two toed sloth you use in Scrabble by the way, but artificial intelligence and he more or less blew my mind, because AI transcends the limits of our poor mammalian brains, crunches problems with astonishing speed, but also somehow creatively and intuitively, so that DeepMind has beaten all comers at Go.
It is already being used to predict where the wind will blow and therefore where is the optimal place to locate your turbines and to predict any maintenance issues before they arise. And the cost of offshore wind power has already fallen by 60 per cent in the last ten years, partly thanks to AI, and you can see the potential of AI to drive it down still further.
We are already using AI to rationalise energy use in the vast data storage centres that are so important to the global economy, and DeepMind has worked out how to cut the use of energy in Google data centres by 40 per cent. Imagine if we could make the same economy in the national grid.
And Demis Hassabis told me how they could now use AI to predict the plasma waves inside a fusion reactor, so as to harvest the energy while controlling the extraordinary temperatures, and I know – fusion may still be a few years away: it was 20 years away 20 years ago.
But when you look at what AI is already achieving, we should have the humility to accept that he might well be right and that AI could be bigger than the internet. And so the right thing for the UK to do now is to recognise this progress and support these amazing industries...
So I am setting the ambition that the UK will aim to build the first general purpose quantum computer, and secure fifty percent of the global quantum computing market by 2040.
And that is why this country is determined to become once again a science superpower.
....
Русский великодержавный шовинизм британского премьер-министра, как приговор москальским украинцам в Кремле:
And never let it be forgotten, in this season of remembrance, that it was Russian blood that enabled us to defeat Nazism...
И никогда пусть не будет забыто, в эти памятные дни, что это была Русская кровь, что позволила нам сокрушить нацизм.
......
И вопрос к внимательным читателям на английском: когда будет запущена первая рабочая термоядерная электростанция?