UK Treasury calls in Blair thinktank to advise on using AI across public services

Biggest donor to the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) is Larry Ellison ex-Oracle, who now owns US Tik Tok and who some posters believe is suppressing content about Epstein.

The TBI and Oracle share a vision of using AI to reform public services, with a specific focus on consolidating data, such as in the NHS.

Tony Blair also sits on the Board of Peace and was very tight with Peter Mandelson.

https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/blair-and-the-billionaire/

Excerpts from the above article:

There is a reason why men whose fortunes are built on AI investments would target the UK, and that is the National Health Service (NHS) and its unique population-level health data. Tech experts talk about Britain’s health records in almost hushed tones. While Europe and the US have some comparable health data sets – such as US veterans’ medical records – none have the depth and breadth of NHS records dating back to 1948. Its potential commercial value, from drugs to genome sequencing has been estimated at up to £10bn per annum.
This sat uncomfortably with many TBI staff, with some describing having to push Oracle’s technology despite knowing they were not in the best interests of the country in question, and even had the potential to cause harm.

The risk of so-called vendor-lock in – tying a buyer to a single supplier – was a source of unease, with one former staffer saying that advising governments to use Oracle cloud services risked “trapping” and “indebting” them in systems that are “initially free but will start charging in future”.

Rwanda, a country where TBI has been present for more than 15 years, was so frustrated with Oracle that it issued a public tender in 2021 for a database management system, stating that it had been “experiencing a very high cost for support and licensing for Oracle systems and it would like to migrate to an affordable system”.