The Lord Bishop of Hereford

I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, on securing this debate. Given the pace of AI development, it could not be more timely. As Pope Leo said in his recent encyclical: “Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible”. Regulation does not of necessity stifle innovation. As David Epstein argues in his recent book Inside the Box, creativity, innovation and problem-solving are often improved by constraints rather than exhortations to “think outside the box”. The need for regulation in this space, however, goes well beyond this. One cannot divorce current technological advances from the moral framework which underlies them. Every advance reflects a moral vision and an ideological bias. There is—in some quarters of the AI industry at least—a dehumanising conviction that evolution drives us towards perfection. AI, it is argued, will be better than us at many things, so why not harvest the best of us and move on? As recent debates about social media use by under-16s demonstrate, large technology companies motivated exclusively by profit do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. Such utilitarianism is not a basis for a human ethical framework. Regulation is ultimately about the restraint of such power for the common good. There are underlying systems which power many of the applications with which we are familiar, and it is these that need to be regulated. As many noble Lords have said, it is insufficient to do this piecemeal by sector when the risks that experts warn about are not sector specific. They are systemic, and potentially catastrophic. Noble Lords in this debate have already suggested many methodologies for bringing that into practice. I urge His Majesty’s Government, in collaboration with other nations, to introduce guardrails at the point of development.