Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)

My Lords, I should first apologise for not being able to attend Second Reading or, arguably more importantly, to be in Committee last week to support the many amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on child protection. I read Hansard carefully and was deeply depressed to see that we were once again needing to rehearse, as she has done again today, the importance of protecting children in the digital era. It seems to be our lot that there is a group of us who keep coming back. We play the merry-go-round and sit in different places; it is a privilege to sit next to the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for the first time in the decade that I have been in the House. I support her Amendment 137. She has given a good exposé as to why we should think really carefully about how we protect children in this AI world. I would just like to add one point about AI itself. We keep being told—in a good way—that AI is an underlying and general-purpose technology. That means we need to properly establish the principles with which we should protect children there. We know that technology is morally neutral; it is the human beings who do the damage. In every other underlying, breakthrough technology, we have learned that we have needed to protect the most vulnerable, whether it was electricity when it first went into factories, toys when they were first distributed on the mass market, or social media, with the age-appropriate design code. I feel that it would be a huge mistake, on the third Bill where many of us have debated this subject matter, for us not to address the fact that, as of today, this is the biggest breakthrough technology of our lifetime. We should recognise that children will need protecting, as well as having the opportunity to benefit from it.