AI, Richard Curtis-land & British Progress

This is a transcript of a short speech delivered at Coordinating British Progress, St Bartholomew the Great, London.

Well, hello everyone. My name is Elliot Leavy.

First and foremost, thank you for inviting me to speak today, Lily and Aeron. It is an honour to speak within the hallowed halls of St Bartholomew the Great.

Now, some of you here will know that this parish was famously used in Richard Curtis’ Four Weddings and a Funeral.

This seems appropriate, because for the longest time, we have resided in ‘Richard Curtis-land’ — a comfortable mirage where everything in Britain was fundamentally ‘alright’, rooted in a miasmic sense of presentpast and moored to a stuttering apologeticism that would make Hugh Grant blush.

But as Mark Carney pointed out at Davos last month, Richard Curtis-land was a ‘pleasant fiction.’

We have spent decades ‘living within a lie’. Participating in the rituals of a Richard Curtis-based order.

We’ve kept the signs in the window, held placards in the rain... long after things can only get better stopped playing and an arthritic Dolly the sheep had died.

So let this, first and foremost, be a eulogy for Richard Curtis-land... for it is dead.

Amen.

The question then, becomes: what comes after? What replaces this pleasant fiction?

It is, of course, why many of us are here today: it is a much overdue dosage of unpleasant realpolitik.

It is in this spirt why I developed the Machinepower Index.

Its thesis is simple: that the ability to deploy AI at scale is the defining strategic capability of the twenty-first century — what I call machinepower.

The index aims to provide the map for that capability. It is a cold-blooded assessment of the physical, intellectual, and political assets required to actually lead, rather than just follow.

Its logic comes not from me but from Alfred Thayer Mahan. In 1890, he published The Influence of Sea Power upon History. In doing so he provided the playbook for the next century of global dominance.

He realised that power isn’t a single “weapon” you pull out in a crisis; in fact it is a total system of production and control.

Mahan’s book changed the world. Kaiser Wilhelm II kept a copy on his bedside table. The Japanese Navy made it required reading before they humiliated Russia at Tsushima. Theodore Roosevelt built the Great White Fleet because of it.

Nations that understood Mahan’s logic became empires. Those that didn’t became dependencies.

He showed that you could have the most advanced battleships in the world, but if you ignored the infrastructure — the production facilities and the coaling stations — you were a “land power” playing at being a “sea power.”

Your reach ended where your system broke down.

This is what the index attempts to do for the intelligence age — identify the total system that separates the AI makers from the AI takers.

In doing so, it looks at three strategic axes: Watts, Weights, and Will.

• WATTS: The material foundation. Our energy. You cannot have an AI renaissance on a crumbling grid.

• WEIGHTS: The intellectual reach. The foundation models, the data pipelines, the talent pool.

• WILL: The institutional foundation. The political grit to actually deploy this power at scale.

Now, Mahan’s thinking didn’t only centre on physical infrastructure. He also focussed on the psyche of the population. He argued that sea power was rooted in a people who were ’sea-minded’ — who understood that their prosperity was tied to the horizon, not just the soil beneath their feet.

We face a similar psychological hurdle today.

Becoming a Machinepower requires us to stop looking at AI as a ‘tech issue’ and start seeing it as a national imperative.

It means rejecting the pleasant fictions of Richard Curtis and steering our destiny once more.

Now, I recently welcomed my beautiful daughter into the world — the population crisis ends at home after all — and as a new father, I am well aware of the value of free time.

So let me finish on this.

If there is one thing we learned from our days as a seapower: it is that the sun never truly sets.

We have a once in a generational opportunity to rebuke the paper-lionnism of the past 30 years and position ourselves as a serious power... a machinepower... once again.

Let us be in no doubt that our prosperity is very much tied to the horizon.

The fact that we are all here today is proof that the sun will rise again.

Thank you.