Lord Johnson of Marylebone (Con)

My Lords, I echo the gratitude to the most reverend Primate for securing this important debate. AI is a technology that changes how human beings relate to knowledge and authority and therefore to one another. For much of the modern era, authority has derived in part from the possession of knowledge and expertise. In the age of AI, both are commoditised. Who will control supply of that commodity? Earlier this year, chillingly to my mind, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, one of the AI companies which is about to list on the US stock market with a trillion dollar-plus valuation, said he predicted “a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter”. Indeed, all over the world, students already are interrogating AI systems about constitutional law, quantum physics or Shakespeare, using their subscriptions to OpenAI and other such services to do so, and they are receiving answers that appear as sophisticated as any given by experts. Our education system, especially our universities with their vital but hard-pressed humanities departments, are grappling with this momentous development. AI challenges not just the role of the professor as the guardian and gatekeeper of disciplinary knowledge and the way we assess learning but the deeper purpose of education itself. Ultimately, the value of higher education cannot simply be in the transmission of knowledge. It must be in the purposeful cultivation, as other noble Lords have said today, of human judgment—the ability to detect disinformation and recognise a beguiling but false argument, and to disagree with each other in a civilised fashion. Large language models make the production of plausible-looking answers trivially easy, and for many students, sadly, almost impossible to resist. But LLMs do not know and do not care if judgment has been formed. They are built to produce fluent outputs, not to nurture epistemic responsibility and actual intellectual growth. The emerging evidence is not that AI inevitably destroys critical thinking. Used well, hybrid intelligence can expand our capabilities, not just substitute them; but used badly, as I fear is increasingly the risk, as an answer machine rather than as a thinking partner, it encourages a damaging form of cognitive offloading that really does weaken our capacity for critical thinking and judgment. Universities as institutions that develop critical thinking perhaps more than most—or at least they are meant to—matter more than ever in the age of AI, not less, but we should be honest: the public are increasingly sceptical that they can actually perform these functions. Earlier this week, in polling from the British Social Attitudes organisation, we saw that scepticism about the value of a degree is now at a record high, with 34% of people polled in England saying that higher education is not worth the time and money it takes, up from 14% in 2005. Many factors might be at play here, but I am sure AI is among them. In the age of AI, universities, as critical institutions in our society, have to regain public trust not by asserting their authority but by demonstrating that they can uphold standards, protect intellectual independence and help us form judgment in ways machines cannot. The task before us is not to resist artificial intelligence; it is to ensure that, in embracing it, we do not fall prey to the temptation of cognitive offloading to the extent that we weaken the capacity to develop judgment of our own.