At the World Governments Summit, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is slated to be in conversation with a Winston Churchill zombie bot while Tony Blair reimagines tech for governments with Oracle’s Larry Ellison.
Update February 13, 2025: The World Governments Summit scrapped the “Boris Johnson: A Conversation With Churchill” session less than 24 hours before it was to take place and replaced it with “A Conversation with Boris Johnson” featuring CNN Business anchor Richard Quest.
In its second year of being called the World Governments Summit, as opposed to the singular “World Government Summit” that it used to be called for past decade, this year’s edition is loaded with heads of state (dead and alive apparently), politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats plotting together under the theme of “Shaping Future Governments.”
With artificial intelligence being a major underlying current throughout the summit, which runs from February 10-13 in Dubai, UAE, viewers and participants will be treated to a variety of top-level sessions about how technology will play a role in governments throughout the world.
On Tuesday, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is slated to hold an AI-powered, necromantic seance with a Winston Churchill zombie bot enabled by Falcon 3, which is an open-source large language model (LLM) developed by the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi.
The original description for the session claimed that we were living in a world “every bit as turbulent which led to the outbreak of the second world war.”
And what better way to navigate today’s technologically complex world than by summoning an incorporeal algorithm to see what wisdom could be extrapolated from its digital cadaver?
“Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson […] talks to his lifelong hero and role model about how we can chart our way through a world every bit as turbulent as that which led to the outbreak of the second world war. This fascination [sic] conversation across the ages is enabled by Falcon 3”
Boris Johnson: A Conversation with Churchill, World Governments Summit, February 2025
Will this “Pet Sematary” version of Churchill suggest sending the Black and Tans into Eastern Europe and the Middle East?
Would this “Talking Dead” Head of State suggest giving certain regions in the world the Bengali treatment?
Or could the dearly-departed digital undead teach us how to defeat fascism, “whatever the cost may be,” while waking up every morning to a glass of scotch and soda?
Probably not.
Continuing with the superficial speculation, Johnson’s conversation with the LLM may just be used to show off some features and capabilities of the technology, with a dash of business promotion and a pinch of propaganda for political purposes.
How much of the Falcon 3 LLM data scraping will come from things Churchill actually said as opposed to the over 2,000 books that others have written about him?
Last week, the World Governments Summit agenda posted a full description of the phantasmagoric session, but at the time of this publication, that description has been erased, and only the title remains.
Moving into the world of the relatively living, another tech-related session at the World Governments Summit on Tuesday will see yet another former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in conversation with Oracle CTO and executive chairman Larry Ellison.
Blair has been on a tear for years in promoting global digital identity schemes while Ellison has been pushing the idea that an AI surveillance state would lead people to be on their best behavior.
More recently, Oracle partnered with OpenAI and SoftBank on a joint venture to invest $500 billion in US President Donald Trump’s new Stargate project that would build data centers and generate the electricity to power them while also reportedly developing mRNA vaccines for cancer treatment.
Together, Blair and Ellison will discuss “Reimagining Technology for Government.”
This year’s 12th edition of the World Governments Summit “will bring together over 200 speakers including world leaders, heads of states and entrepreneurs to discuss collaboration between governments,” according to the event organizers.
Among the hundreds listed as speakers at this years summit include the likes of:
All-in-all, “Over 30 heads of state and government, more than 80 international organizations, 140 government delegations, and over 6,000 participants,” will take part in this year’s summit.
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