Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)

My Lords, the smartphone, the web and ancillaries would have seemed magical just a generation ago. There is no gainsaying their benefits to billions worldwide. It is welcome that machines supplement, if not replace, white-collar jobs, routine legal work, accountancy and even surgery. This clearly needs regulation at a national level. However, looking ahead, we must keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to transformative advances that may seem exhilarating today but are frightening too. LLMs will surely confront us, writ large with the downsides of existing social media—fake news, photos and videos of unmoderated extremist diatribes and so forth. Social media can spread panic and rumour, and psychic and economic contagion, literally at the speed of light. Experts such as Geoff Hinton speak of “human extinction”. This may be an exaggeration. My concern is less the science fiction scenarios of a takeover by superintelligence, but rather the risks of breakdowns or sabotage of interconnected networks, electricity grids, GPS, the internet et cetera, which could cause a societal breakdown that cascades globally. Regulation for this is harder. The Atomic Energy Authority works because building an atom bomb requires large-scale conspicuous facilities. It is not so easy to control developers of rogue viruses or, indeed, cyber criminals, and that is the problem we face. There needs to be a balance to enable innovation to continue but also display a method of doing all we can to prevent such spreads, which could be catastrophic. To quote a well-known proverb, although this is unfamiliar, it is not improbable, and the biggest scare we face in coming decades is this one.