YouSaid · the spoken record

Boris Johnson

lines on the record: 55
first: 2019-09-24
most recent: 2021-09-24
sittings or episodes: 3
sources: un-general-debate

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I therefore invite members of this great General Assembly to come in November and take part, by their actions, in what I hope will be a global coming of age and to blow out the candles of a world on fire. That is what I think we should do. I thank members for the pledges that they are making. I hope that they will increase them and do what is needed. Mr. President, I will see you in Glasgow.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“It is certainly true that Sophocles was right in sensing that our species is uniquely capable of its own destruction and the destruction of everything around us. But if we look at look at the Greek, what Sophocles actually said was that humankind is awesome. We are both terrifying and awesome. I think he was right on that point. We have an awesome power to change things — and for the better — and an awesome power to save ourselves. In the next 40 days, we have to choose — the world has to choose — what kind of awesome we are going to be. To get back to my metaphor of adolescence, I hope that COP 26 will be a sixteenth birthday party for humankind — not a miserable party, but a party in which we choose to grow up, recognize the scale of the challenge that we face and do what posterity demands that we must.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“It is these technological breakthroughs that will cut the cost for consumers so that we have nothing to fear and everything to gain from this green industrial revolution. When Kermit the frog sang “It’s not easy being green” — we all remember that one — he was wrong. I want Assembly members to know that it is easy. It is not only easy; it is lucrative. It is right to be green, even if Kermit was unnecessarily rude to Miss Piggy. It is easy to be green because we have the technology, as we used to say when I was a when I was a kid. We can do it. In 40 days’ time, we will have the choice before us. The poet Sophocles is often quoted — or often quoted by me anyway — as saying that there are many terrifying things in the world, but none is more terrifying than humankind.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“My point is that these investments will not only help the countries of the world to tackle climate change, but they will also produce millions — literally millions in the decades to come — millions and millions of high-wage, high-skilled jobs. Today’s workforce and the next generation of green-collar workers will have the extra satisfaction of knowing that beyond being well remunerated, they are doing something useful, providing green energy and helping to save the planet at the same time. Every day, green startups are producing new ideas from feeding seaweed to cows to restrain their traditional signs of digestive approval to using artificial intelligence and robotics to enhance food production, capture carbon dioxide and put it into brownies and so on.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“It is the trillions of dollars of private-sector cash that will enable developing nations and the whole world — all of us — to make the necessary changes. To give an example, it was the United Kingdom Government that set the strike price for the private sector to come in and transform our country into the Saudi Arabia of wind, in a manner of speaking. We do not resemble Saudi Arabia in many ways, but we in terms of offshore wind, we produce more offshore-wind power than any other country in the world. Only yesterday, the United Kingdom’s first sovereign green bond raised £10 billion on the markets, from hard-headed investors who want to make money.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“I want the Assembly to know that in spite of all the pressures on our finances in the United Kingdom caused by COVID-19, we have kept that promise to the letter. I am therefore very pleased and encouraged by some of the pledges we have heard in this Hall, including from Denmark and now a very substantial commitment from the United States that brings us within touching distance of that $100 billion pledge that we need every year. But we must go further. We must be clear that government — government cash alone — is not going to be enough. We must work together so that international financial institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, are working with Governments around the world to leverage in the private sector.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“Although we were in fact of course doing something rather wonderful in one sense — we were setting in train a new era of technology that was itself to lead to a massive global reduction in poverty, emancipating billions of people around the world — the industrial revolution was a good thing fundamentally — but we were also unwittingly beginning to quilt the great tea cozy of carbon dioxide around the world. We therefore understand that when the developing world looks to us to help, we must take our responsibilities. That is why two years ago, when I last came to the General Assembly, I committed the United Kingdom to providing £11.6 billion to help the rest of the world to tackle climate change.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“We must also work towards the crucial United Nations summit on biodiversity in Kunming, China. By the way, on the subject of planting trees, we are going to plant millions in the United Kingdom, but I was absolutely blown away the Pakistani pledge. Indeed, I invite everybody to follow the example of Imran Khan of Pakistan, who has pledged to plant 10 billion trees in Pakistan alone, and he is doing so. It is very important that we in the developed world recognize our obligation to help less developed countries down the path of embracing these technologies. We have got to be honest. We in the United Kingdom, we in Britain, started this industrial hydrocarbon-based revolution. We were the first to send great puffs of acrid smoke into the heavens on a scale large enough to derange the natural order.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“We also recognize that this is not just about using technical fixes in technology to cut carbon dioxide; we also need to work together around the world to restore the balance between humankind and nature — a balance that has obviously been proved so hopelessly out of whack by the emergence of a zoonotic pandemic, for instance. We need to halt and reverse the loss of trees and biodiversity by 2030. We should achieve that goal by making a pledge to do so at COP 26 in just 40 days’ time. That is why we in the United Kingdom are committed to beautifying the landscape and strengthening our protection against flooding by planting millions more trees — beautiful trees that stop soil erosion, provide habitats for insects, birds and mammals, and which of course help to fix carbon in the atmosphere.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“The NDC is the pledge that, in the run up to COP 26, every country has been asked to make in terms of cutting carbon. We are going to go down by 68 per cent by 2030, compared to where we were in 1990. We are making a big bet on hydrogen. We are going to be expanding our nuclear capacity. The logic of going for more renewables is clear when we look at the spike in hydrocarbon prices, particularly gas. We are helping people to reduce their own households’ carbon-dioxide emissions by retrofitting their homes and going for new sources of heating. We are working towards building a “jet-zero”— the first large, guilt-free, carbon-free passenger plane.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“That is because my Government has set a hard deadline for the sale of new hydrocarbon internal-combustion-engine vehicles by 2030, which is the most aggressive deadline in the whole of Europe. Again, we call on the world to come together to drive this market in a low-carbon way, so that by 2040 there are only zero-emission vehicles on sale anywhere in the world. My point is that we can make these massive cuts in pollution and emissions while driving jobs and growth. We have cut our greenhouse-gas emissions by 44 per cent in the last 30 years while expanding our gross domestic product by 78 per cent, and we will now go further by implementing one of the biggest nationally determined contributions (NDCs) currently being offered.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“By the way, I want very much to thank President Xi of China for what he has just done to end China’s international financing of coal, and I hope China will now go further and phase out the domestic use of coal as well. Would that not be a great thing? The experience of the United Kingdom shows that it can be done. When I was elected Mayor of London, a mere 13 years ago, I was desperate to encourage more electric vehicles. We went around the city putting in charging points. In those days, charging points were pretty lonely objects, not much patronized. But, today, it is totally different, and the market for electric vehicles is growing at an extraordinary pace, maybe by two thirds every year. And Nissan is sufficiently confident now to invest a billion pounds in a new electric-vehicle factory plus a gigafactory for batteries.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“But in the in the United Kingdom, that percentage is now down to 2 per cent or less, and coal will be gone altogether from our energy production by 2024. We have put in great forests of beautiful wind turbines on the drowned prairies of Doggerland, between Britain and Holland in the North Sea. In fact, we produce so much offshore wind that I am thinking of changing my name in honour of the God of the North wind to “‘Boreas’ Johnson”. Here I go: shoving in a classical allusion at this time of night to see if delegations are paying attention. I know that we are ambitious in our scheme — the developing world ending the use of coal power by 2040 and the developed world doing so by 2030. But the experience of the United Kingdom shows that it can be done, and profitably too.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“By the way, I am not one of those environmentalists who takes a moral pleasure in excoriating humankind for its excess. I do not see the green movement as a pretext for a wholesale assault on capitalism — far from it. The whole experience of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the way to fix the problem is through science and innovation, through the breakthroughs and the investments that are made possible by capitalism and free markets. It is through our Promethean faith in new green technology that we are cutting emissions in the United Kingdom. When I was a kid, we produced almost 80 per cent of our electricity from coal. I know that some of the delegations in the Hall tonight come from countries that rely very heavily on coal.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“I am proud to say that when my friend and colleague Alok Sharma, the President-designate of COP 26, began his mission — his peregrinations around the world — that number was only 30 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product. We are getting there. That is the point I am making. We can go further, and if we are going to stave off these hikes, these rises in temperature, we must go further, and we must go far faster. We need all countries, every single country represented in this Hall today, to step up and commit to very substantial reductions by 2030. I am absolutely convinced, and I passionately believe, that we can do it by making commitments in four areas, and I want the Assembly to remember them: coal, cars, cash and trees. I repeat: Coal, cars, cash and trees. It is very simple.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“In just 40 days’ time, we need the world to come to Glasgow to make the commitments necessary. We are not talking about stopping the rise in temperatures We cannot do that; it is too late to stop the rise in temperatures. But to restrain that rise to 1°5 C, we need to pledge collectively to achieve carbon neutrality — net-zero — by the middle of the century, and that will be an amazing moment if we can do it, because it will mean that for the first time in centuries, humankind is no longer adding to the budget of carbon in the atmosphere, no longer thickening that invisible quilt that is warming the planet. It is fantastic that we now have countries here at the United Nations, representing 70 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product, that are committed to this net- zero objective.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“If we keep on the current track, then the temperatures will go up by 2°7F or more by the end of the century. Never mind what that will do to the ice flows, dissolving like ice in a martini here in New York. We will see desertification, drought, crop failure and mass movements of humankind on a scale not seen before, not because of some unforeseen natural event or disaster, but because of us, because of what we are doing now. And our grandchildren will know that we are the culprits, and they will know that we knew, that we were warned. They will know that it was this generation that came centre stage to speak and act on behalf of them, on behalf of posterity, and that we missed our cue. They will ask themselves what kind of people we were to be so selfish and so short sighted.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“We have released energy from within the atom itself and from hydrogen. We have found ways to store that energy in increasingly capacious batteries and even in molten salt. We have the tools for a green industrial revolution. We have the kit, but time is desperately short. Two days ago, here in New York, we had a meeting in which we heard from the leaders of the nations most threatened by climate change — Marshall Islands, the Maldives, Bangladesh and many others — and they spoke of the hurricanes, the flooding and the fires caused by the extreme meteorological conditions the world is already seeing. The tragedy is that because of our past inaction, there are further rises in temperatures that are already baked in — and baked is the word.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“Daily, weekly, we are doing such irreversible damage that long before a million years are up, we will have made this beautiful planet effectively uninhabitable, not just for us, but for many other species. That is why the twenty-sixth session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 26) — the summit soon to take place at Glasgow — is the turning point for humankind. We must limit the rise in temperatures, whose appalling effects were visible even this summer, to 1°5C. We must come together in a collective coming of age. We must show that we have the maturity and wisdom to act. And we can. Even in the past 16 years, as it were, in this feckless youth that we have just passed, we have shown our skill. We have harnessed clean energy from wind and wave and sun.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“The adolescence of humankind is coming to an end and must come to an end. We are approaching that critical turning point in less than two months, in just over 40 days, when we must show that we are capable of learning and maturing and finally taking responsibility for the destruction we are inflicting not just upon our planet, but upon ourselves. It is time for humankind to grow up. It is time for us to listen to the warnings of the scientists. If we look at coronavirus disease (COVID-19), we have an example of the gloomy scientist being proved right. It is time for us to grow up and understand who we are and what we are doing. The world, this precious blue sphere with its eggshell crust and wisp of an atmosphere, is not some indestructible toy, some bouncy plastic romper room against which we can hurl ourselves to our hearts’ content.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“We have come to that fateful age when we know roughly how to drive, unlock the drinks cabinet and engage in all sorts of activity that is not only potentially embarrassing but also terminal for ourselves and others. In the words of Oxford philosopher Toby Ord, we are just old enough to get ourselves into serious trouble. We still cling with parts of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure. We combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality. We believe that someone else will clean up the mess we have made, because that is what someone else has always done. We trash our habitats again and again, with the inductive reasoning that since we have gotten away with it so far, we will get away with it again.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“I thank the members — the faithful few — who waited until the end of today’s very important meeting. It is very good to see my audience. An inspection of the fossil record over the past 178 million years since mammals first appeared reveals that the average mammalian species — and indeed we are all mammals — exists for about 1 million years before it evolves into something else or vanishes into extinction. Of our allotted lifespan of 1 million years, humankind — Homo sapiens — has been around for approximately 200,000 years. In other words, we are still collectively a youngster. If we imagine that 1 million years as the lifespan of an individual human being or approximately 80 years, then we are now sweet 16.”
2021-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 76 (2021)
“And here in the UK, the birthplace of Edward Jenner who pioneered the world’s first vaccine We are determined to do everything in our power to work with our friends across the UN, to heal those divisions and to heal the world.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“It is not even technically alive. Tragic as its consequences have been, it has been nothing like as destructive as other plagues — let alone the influenza of a century ago. It is absurd, in many ways, outrageous that this microscopic enemy should have routed the unity of the human race. COVID-19 has caused us to cease other vital work, and I’m afraid it made individual nations seem selfish and divided from each other. Every day people were openly encouraged to study a grisly reverse Olympic league table, and to take morbid and totally mistaken comfort in the greater sufferings of others. We cannot go on like that, we cannot make these mistakes again.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“The UK will do this as soon as our new independent tariff regime comes into effect on 1st January and I hope others will do the same. Though the world is still in the throes of this pandemic, all these steps are possible if we have the will. They are the right way forward for the world, and Britain is the right country to give that lead. And we will do so in 2021, as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of this great United Nations in London in January, and through our G7 Presidency, and as we host the world’s climate change summit, COP26, in Glasgow next November. The COVID-19 pandemic has been an immense psychic shock to the human race. Global fears have been intensified by the immediacy of round the clock news and social media. We sometimes forget, we face a virus — a small package of nucleic acid that simply replicates.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“We need to rediscover that latent gift and instinct, but it would be insane to ignore the insights of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. We need secure supply chains — but we should still rely on the laws of comparative advantage and the invisible hand of the market. Many countries imposed export controls at the outset of the pandemic, about two thirds of which remain in force. Governments still target their trade barriers on exactly what we most need to combat the virus, with tariffs on disinfectant often exceeding 10 per cent, and for soap tariffs for 30 per cent. So I would urge every country to take a fifth step and lift the export controls wherever possible — and agree not to revive them — and cancel any tariffs on the vital tools of our struggle: gloves, protective equipment, thermometers and other COVID-critical products.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“And if all our defences are breached, and we face another crisis, we should at least be able to rely on our fourth step, and have all the protocols ready for an emergency response, covering every relevant issue, along with the ability to devise new ones swiftly. Never again must we wage 193 different campaigns against the same enemy. As with all crises, it is crucial not to learn the wrong lessons. After the harrowing struggle to equip ourselves with enough ventilators — with countries scrabbling to improvise like the marooned astronauts of Apollo 13 — there is a global movement to onshore manufacturing. That is understandable. Here in the UK we found ourselves unable to make gloves, aprons, enzymes which an extraordinary position for a country that was once the workshop of the world.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“But if that fails and a new disease jumps from animals to human beings and overcomes our armoury of therapies and begins to spread, then we need to know what’s going on as fast as possible. So the third objective should be to design a global pandemic early warning system, based on a vast expansion of our ability to collect and analyse samples and distribute the findings, using health data-sharing agreements covering every country. As far as possible, we should aim to predict a pandemic almost as we forecast the weather to see the thunderstorm in the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Of the billions of pathogens, the great mass are thankfully incapable of vaulting the species barrier. Once we discover the dangerous ones, our scientists could get to work on identifying their weaknesses and refining anti-viral treatments before they strike. We could open the research to every country and as we learn more, our scientists might begin to assemble an armoury of therapies — a global pharmacopoiea — ready to make the treatment for the next COVID-19. Our second step should be to develop the manufacturing capacity for treatments and vaccines So that the whole of humanity can hold them like missiles in silos ready to zap the alien organisms before they can attack.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“So we in the UK we’re going to work with our friends, we’re going to use our G7 presidency next year to create a new global approach to health security based on a five point plan to protect humanity against another pandemic. Our first aim should be to stop a new disease before it starts. About 60 percent of the pathogens circulating in the human population originated in animals and leapt from one species to the other in a “zoonotic” transmission. The world could seek to minimise the danger by forging a global network of zoonotic research hubs, charged with spotting dangerous animal pathogens that may cross the species barrier and infect human beings. The UK is ready to harness its scientific expertise and cooperate to the fullest extent with our global partners to this end.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“I don’t think there is any reason for fatalism: of course, the dangers can never be wholly eliminated, but human ingenuity and expertise can reduce the risk. Imagine how much suffering might have been avoided if we had already identified the pathogen that became COVID-19 while it was still confined to animals? Suppose we had been able to reach immediately into a global medicine chest and take out a treatment? What if countries had been ready to join together from the outset to develop and trial a vaccine? And think how much strife would have been prevented if the necessary protocols — covering quarantine and data-sharing and PPE and so much else — had, so far as possible, been ready on the shelf for humanity to use?”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“In June we helped to raise almost $9 billion to immunise another 300 million children against killer diseases, and Gavi also stands ready to help distribute a COVID-19 vaccine. But even as we strive for a vaccine, we must never cut corners, slim down the trials or sacrifice safety to speed. Because it would be an absolute tragedy if in our eagerness, we were to boost the nutjobs — the anti vaxxers, dangerous obsessives who campaign against the whole concept of vaccination and who would risk further millions of lives. And now is the time above all to look ahead and think now about how to stop a pandemic from happening again. How can we stop another virus from coming along and again smashing that precious Ming vase of international cooperation? How can we avoid the mutual quarantines and the brutal Balkanisation of the world economy?”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“The health of every country depends on the whole world having access to a safe and effective vaccine, wherever a breakthrough might occur; and, the UK, we will do everything in our power to bring this about. We are already the biggest single donor to the efforts of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness to find a vaccine. And it is precisely because we know that no-one is safe until everyone is safe, that I can announce that the UK will contribute up to £571 million to COVAX, a new initiative designed to distribute a COVID-19 vaccine across the world. Of this sum, £500 million will be for developing countries to protect themselves. The UK is already the biggest donor to Gavi, the global vaccine alliance.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“And as I speak there are 100 potential vaccines that are trying to clear the hurdles of safety and efficacy, as if in a giant global steeplechase. We don’t know which may be successful. We do not know if any of them will be successful. The Oxford vaccine is now in stage 3 of clinical trials, and in case of success AstraZeneca has already begun to manufacture millions of doses, in readiness for rapid distribution, and they have reached agreement with the Serum Institute of India to supply one billion doses to low and middle-income countries. But it would be futile to treat the quest for a vaccine as a contest for narrow national advantage and immoral to seek a head start through obtaining research by underhand means.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Bill Gates sounded the alert in 2015, five years ago he gave that amazing prediction — almost every word of which has come true — and we responded as if to a persistent Microsoft error message by clicking “ok” and carrying on. Humanity was caught napping. We have been scrabbling to catch up, and with agonising slowness we are making progress Epidemiologists at Oxford University identified the first treatment for COVID-19. They did trials with our national health service and found that a cheap medicine called dexamethasone reduces the risk of death by over a third for patients on ventilators. The UK immediately shared this discovery with the world, so that as many as 1.4 million lives could be saved in the next six months by this one, single advance.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“And so the UK supports the efforts of the World Health Organisation and of my friend, Tedros, to explore the aetiology of the disease, because however great the need for reform, the WHO, the World Health Organization, is still the one body that marshals humanity against the legions of disease. That is why we in the UK — global Britain — are one of the biggest global funders of that organisation, contributing £340 million over the next four years, that’s an increase of 30 percent. And as we now send our medical detectives to interview the witnesses and the suspects — bats, the pangolins, whoever — we should have enough humility to acknowledge that alarm bells were ringing before this calamity struck. In the last 20 years, there have been eight outbreaks of a lethal virus, any of which could have escalated into a pandemic.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Now is the time — therefore, here at what I devoutly hope will be the first and last ever Zoom UNGA — for humanity to reach across borders and repair these ugly rifts. Let’s heal the world — literally and metaphorically. And let’s begin with the truth, because as someone once said, the truth shall set you free. And with nearly a million people dead, with colossal economic suffering already inflicted and more to come, there is a moral imperative for humanity to be honest and to reach a joint understanding of how the pandemic began, and how it was able to spread — Not because I want to blame any country or government, or to score points. I simply believe — as a former COVID patient — that we all have a right to know, so that we can collectively do our best to prevent a recurrence.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“And the pace has been so urgent and the pressures so intense that each national government — democracy or otherwise — has decided entirely understandably to put the interests of its domestic population first. We have seen borders spring up between friends and allies, sometimes without consultation. We have seen the disruption of global supply chains with cheque book wars on airport tarmacs as nation has vied with nation for a supply of PPE. And after nine months of fighting COVID-19, the very notion of the international community looks, frankly, pretty tattered. And we know that we simply can’t continue in this way. Unless we get our act together. Unless we unite and turn our fire against our common foe, we know that everyone will lose. The inevitable outcome would be to prolong this calamity and increase the risk of another.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“Never in the history of our species — not since the almighty felled the tower of babel — has the human race been so obsessed with one single topic of conversation. We have been following the same debates, researching the potential of the same drugs, and time and again we have been typing the same word into our search engines. COVID-19, coronavirus, has united humanity as never before. And yet the crisis has also been an extraordinary force for division. We have all been up against the same enemy. The same tiny opponent threatening everyone in much the same way, but members of the UN have still waged 193 separate campaigns, as if every country somehow contains a different species of human being. Across the world there has been an infinite variety of curfews and restrictions and closures, and we have fought in a spirit of sauve qui peut.”
2020-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 75 (2020)
“If we master this challenge — and I have no doubt that we can — then we will not only safeguard our ideals, we will surmount the limits that once constrained humankind and conquer the perils that once ended so many lives. Together, we will vanquish killer diseases, eliminate famine, protect the environment and transform our cities. Success will depend, now as ever, on freedom, openness and pluralism, which is the formula that not only emancipates the human spirit, but also releases the boundless ingenuity and inventiveness of humankind, and which, above all, the United Kingdom will strive to preserve and advance.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“The French somehow rapidly recovered by a process that I am not quite sure was entirely fair. But in the United Kingdom, in London, we still have by far the biggest technology sector anywhere in Europe. We have every kind of technology — financial technology, biological technology, medical technology, nanotechnology, green technology — and perhaps half a million people working in technology alone. I hope to see everyone there as we seek to assemble the broadest possible coalition to take forward this vital task, building on all that the United Kingdom can contribute to this mission as a global leader in ethical and responsible technology.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“But we must continue to be more ambitious: we need to find the right balance between freedom and control, between innovation and regulation, and between private enterprise and Government oversight. We must insist that the ethical judgments inherent in the design of new technology are transparent to all and we must make our voices heard more loudly in the standards bodies that write the rules. Above all, we need to agree a common set of global principles to shape the norms and standards that will guide the development of emerging technology. Here is the good news. I invite all present to a summit next year in London — a wonderful city where, by the way, it is not raining 94 per cent of the time. At one stage, when I was Mayor of London, we discovered that we had even more Michelin-starred restaurants than Paris.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“The mission of the United Kingdom and all who share our values must therefore be to ensure that emerging technologies are designed from the outset for freedom, openness and pluralism, with the right safeguards in place to protect our peoples. Month by month, vital decisions are being taken in academic committees, company boardrooms and industry standards groups. They are writing the rulebooks of the future, making ethical judgements and choosing what will or will not be rendered possible. Together, we need to ensure that new advances reflect our values by design. There is excellent work being done by the European Union, the Commonwealth and, of course, the United Nations, which has a vital role in ensuring that no country is excluded from the wonderful benefits of this technology and the industrial revolution it is bringing about.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“That is the point I wish to make tonight. At stake is whether we bequeath an Orwellian world, designed for censorship, repression and control, or a world of emancipation, debate and learning, where technology threatens famine and disease but not our freedoms. Seven decades ago, the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with no dissenting voices, uniting humankind for the first and perhaps only time behind one set of principles. Our joint declaration upholds the freedom of opinion and expression, the privacy of home and correspondence, and the right to seek and impart information and ideas. Unless we ensure that new technology reflects this spirit, I fear that our declaration will mean nothing and no longer hold.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“New advances are making renewable energy ever cheaper, aiding our common struggle against climate change. Our understanding of the natural world is being transformed by genome sequencing — the discovery of the very essence of life itself, the secret genetic code that animates the spirit of every living being and allows medical breakthroughs the likes of which we have never known. Treatments are tailored to the precise genetic makeup of the individual. So far, we have discovered the secrets of less than 0.3 per cent of complex life on the planet. Think what we will achieve when — and it is a matter of when — we understand 1 or 2 per cent of it, let alone 5 or 10 per cent. But it is how we design the emerging technologies behind these breakthroughs and which values inform their design that will shape the future of humankind.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“Neural interface technology is producing a new generation of cochlear implants, allowing the gift of hearing to people who would not otherwise be able to hear the voices of their own children. A London technology company has worked out how to help the blind to navigate more freely with nothing more than an app on their smartphones — new technologies, produced in Britain, helping the deaf to hear and the blind to see. We used to think that printing was something that you did to run off a boarding card; now a British company has used 3D printing to make an engine capable of blasting a rocket into space. In African countries, millions of people without bank accounts can now transfer money using a simple app; they can buy solar energy and leap in one transaction from no electricity to green power.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“And there are today people today who are actually anti-science — a whole movement called the anti-vaxxers, who refuse to acknowledge the evidence that vaccinations have eradicated smallpox and who by their prejudices are actually endangering the very children they want to protect. I totally reject this anti-scientific pessimism. I am profoundly optimistic about the ability of new technology to serve as a liberator and remake the world wondrously and benignly; indeed, in countless respects technology is already doing just that. Today, nanotechnology, as I mentioned earlier, is revolutionizing medicine by designing robots a fraction of the size of a red blood cell, capable of swimming through our bodies, dispensing medicine and attacking malignant cells like some Star Wars armada.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“And every time his liver regrew, the eagle came back and pecked it again. This went on forever, a bit like the experience of Brexit in the United Kingdom, if some of our parliamentarians had their way. In fact, it was a standard poetic practice to curse the protos heuretes, the person responsible for any scientific or technical breakthrough. If only they had never invented the ship, then Jason would never have sailed to Colchis, and all sorts of disasters would never have happened. It is a deep human instinct to be wary of any kind of technical progress. In 1829, they thought the human frame would not withstand the speeds attained by Stephenson’s rocket.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“Artificial intelligence — what will it mean? Helpful robots washing and caring for an ageing population? Or pink-eyed terminators sent back from the future to cull the human race? What will synthetic biology stand for — restoring our livers and our eyes with miracle regeneration of the tissues, like some fantastic hangover cure? Or will it bring terrifying limbless chickens to our tables? Will nanotechnology help us to beat disease, or will it leave tiny robots to replicate in the crevices of our cells? It is a trope as old as literature that any scientific advance is punished by the gods. When Prometheus brought fire to humankind in a tube of fennel, as you may remember, with his brother Epimetheus, Zeus punished him by chaining him to a Tartarean crag while his liver was pecked out — I did talk about a hangover cure — by an eagle.”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)
“The reason I am giving this speech today with its slightly gloomy proem is that the United Kingdom is one of the world’s technology leaders, and I believe that Governments have been simply caught unawares by the unintended consequences of the Internet, a scientific breakthrough more far-reaching in its everyday psychological impact than any other invention since Gutenberg’s. And when one considers how long it took for books to come into widespread circulation, the arrival of the Internet is far bigger than print. It is bigger than the atomic age, but it is like nuclear power in that it is capable of both good and harm. But of course it is not alone. As new technologies seem to race towards us from the far horizon, we strain our eyes as they come to make out whether they are for good or bad — friends or foes?”
2019-09-24 · UN General Assembly · General Debate, Session 74 (2019)