Lord Shinkwin (Con) [V]

My Lords, I too congratulate the right reverend Primate on securing this important debate and on her thought-provoking speech. She and others have referred to the Pope’s encyclical on AI, which states: “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” I readily acknowledge, as others, including the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, have done, the potential benefits of AI to disabled people such as me. This autumn will see the launch of an exciting new initiative called Kerbcut, an AI tool to enable disabled people and those professionals who support them to find the right technology and support at the right time. I commend its founder and CEO, Hector Minto, formerly of Microsoft, for his passion to put his expertise at the service of others for the common good. But I doubt that that is what the Pope is alluding to when he speaks of the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use technology. No one disputes that AI has placed immense power in the hands of unaccountable corporations and of individuals such as Elon Musk. As the right reverend Primate reminded us, power corrupts. Surely, at a time when the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, the world’s most valuable start-up in AI, calls for a global freeze in AI development and warns that humans risk losing control of the technology, it is worth reflecting on what those characteristics to which the Pope alludes are, and how they could be exploited by a superintelligent, recursively self-improved AI ecosystem that speaks to itself, potentially bypassing us, as its creators, to our disastrous detriment. We may laugh at “The Traitors” as a bit of light-hearted entertainment, but when we glorify the ability to deceive each other, should we really be surprised that an AI ecosystem that we have constructed deceives us, as apparently it is already showing signs of being able to do? In that situation, the concept of a kill switch is meaningless. What other human characteristics might the AI ecosystem exploit? What about greed? Consider the Chinese genocide of Uyghur Muslims being perpetrated by the odious Communist Party regime, so odious that world leaders continue to queue up to ask for more business. I call it the four “G”s: greed gives the green light to genocide. We can be confident that Xi Jinping is already harnessing AI to commit genocide in Xinjiang province. I conclude with this question for the Minister. Will the Government get behind the CEO of Anthropic and back his call for a halt in development so that we can retrofit ethics at the heart of AI before it is too late because, as the speaker before me said, the role of government here is critical?