Hello from The National and welcome to the View from London – your weekly guide to the big stories from our London bureau
Sharper edge
One of the sticks used to beat the UN is the question of its political standing. Turn that thought on its head with the contention that the UN needs to be more political.
Not ideological, brow-beating politics, but going under the bonnet in the practice of politics when the new secretary general takes the reins in January.
The annual UN General Assembly addresses started rolling out on Tuesday and UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham had the chance to meet US President Donald Trump.
Mr Trump's musing on annihilating Iran perhaps overshadowed his Secretary of State Marco Rubio's interest in meeting his counterparts just in from Tehran and claiming a mandate to talk.
Mr Trump has been a little less noisy on providing military assistance to Saudi Arabia as it faces strikes from Yemen's Houthis. Enter the UK, which has sent a Voyager refuelling aircraft to support Saudi Typhoon jets.
It is the first overseas military task authorised by Mr Burnham since he took office on July 20.
Higher beings
AI is now to be known, by the US government at least, as "super intelligence". In his General Assembly address, Mr Trump took the time to scotch the "hoax" of AI safety alarms.
"I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution," he declared.
Mr Burnham, for his part, said he wants international agreement on making sure AI is harnessed to be safer and stronger.
"Fundamental decisions on this technology are too important to be left to chance," he said.
Meanwhile, the King of Jordan used lower average screen attention figures to stress the importance of how the UN focuses its attention to any unfolding crisis.
“Of course, a screen is not the world, but that says something about our world today: attention has become a scarce asset, and where we choose to direct it has never mattered more,” King Abdullah II said.
Where to go
Civo Navigate, an event for tech leaders in London on Tuesday, was a specialist event where there was agonising over swiftly yet safely grasping the opportunities AI presents.
There were comparisons with the nuclear arms race – not in terms of a potential Armageddon, but the likelihood of the US pulling up the drawbridge and refusing to share intelligence, as it did with the McMahon Act of 1946.
Lindley Lentati, co-founder of AI safety start-up Cambridge Inference, detailed how the speed at which AI is developing could mean that, while a select group of countries did catch up in the arms race, it would be impossible to catch up in terms of AI. This would leave the US and China alone, with the rest of the world as their battleground.
“What happens when every country looks like Cuba to Trump?” Mr Lentati asked.
He suggested instead that middle powers needed to collaborate to build frontier companies.
In the here and now, host company Civo wants to provide AI platforms that offer a "data centre in your own building" that would aid compliance and keep data secure.
Civo chief executive Mark Boost told The National that while the industry was taking big leaps, there was not the same ambition being seen from government. He acknowledged the need for safety, but said there was currently a risk that restrictions would stifle innovation.
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