so mortgage costs rise, too, and there s a return of the 100% house loan. recession s probably off the table, but making ends meet is tough. people come in and sometimes they mention they ve only got so much to spend so, you know, you try and give them the best deal you can. so we have one big question this morning. will it be hard for the country to make a living for years to come? sky high gas and electriticy prices are part of the problem the energy secretary, grant shapps, is here. what would labour do differently? johnny reynolds shadow business secretaryjoins us too. and maybe the economy will be turned upside down by robots anyway tech boss emad mostaque has stopped by. i think this will be a bigger economic impact than the pandemic. it s up to us to decide the direction. and food prices are part of the pressure. the boss of world food programme cindy mccain on why it s a much bigger problem than at our checkouts. we are asking everybody to please support us be
appropriately, from the artificial intelligence summit at bletchley park. the other big story this week, though, has been the quite eye popping testimony at the public inquiry into how the government handled various phases of the covid epidemic. and, i mean, it has massively, massively taken me back to those scary, uncertain days in early spring 2020. and i spent a lot of those days sat in this very studio and the person sat across from me and being very reassuring at all times was laura k, who s back in the studio. not in the studio. no, i m not. but i m logistically distanced today, not socially distanced. and i m very pleased to hear that i was reassuring back in those early days of march 2020. you were one of the only people i saw! well, i m pleased. well, it was very nice. we were a tiny little band of people, carrying on, trying to do ourjobs as everybody wondered what on earth was going on. and it s been a very strange experience watching this, hasn t it? because i was
godlike personality that has grown around him, that is not seen as invincible any more. russia has faced repeated rounds of western sanctions, but its economy has continued to grow thanks to help from china. it means the mood at russia s equivalent of davos welcome to newsnight. our political panel tonight philip collins, who was tony blair s speech writer and worked alongside sir keir starmer on his 2021 conference speech, and mercy muroki, who is a former policy adviser to the conservative s kemi badenoch. today has been very much about the fall out from last night s tv debate when mr sunak claimed housesholds would be paying £2,000 more in tax if labour win. we questioned energy secretary clare coutinho on newsnight last night straight after the itv debate. clare coutinho, where did you get this £2,000 figure from? because it is not an impartial independent figure, is it, it is your own tory special advisers who have added this up and come up with the sums? no, no, n
question, is because it s true. i mean, victoria, you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out and that s what this is. that s independent civil servants in the treasury. i am going to pull you up on that, clare coutinho, i am going to pull you on that. they re not independent, they re not impartial, the assumptions on which the calculations are based have been made by tory special advisers, they are political appointees. they are very strict. hang on a second. no, hang on, and that is misleading to voters, and therefore very disrespectful. so can ijust say, those numbers are created by the treasury, and there s very strict rules on how youcando opposition costings. if you think that the treasury would just add up anything that tory special advisers gave, no matter what it was, and come up with a figure, which is backed by the treasury, then you are sorely mistaken. so nick is here, and the conservatives have doubled down on this today and keir starmer has called the prime minister a liar w
i m not sure what that will be, but i know by next year this technology is everywhere, it s in our phones, it s in our workplaces, and it s moving the nature of society. what could that kind of moment be though? you say when tom hanks caught covid suddenly it was real for everyone, suddenly it was here, and you say there will be some kind of moment like that for al. but what kind of thing could it be, do you think? so, like, last week the republican party had an ai generated attack ad against president biden. thisjust in. we can now call the 2024 presidential race forjoe biden. and that is something that governments have to respond to. does it worry you though that in america we are seeing political parties starting to use ai? yes, it does, and again i think it s an inevitability. technology is advancing anyway. the question is can we standardise it. this is why i want to put a real focus on the training data. the material that s being put into these supercomputers. exactly, rubbish in