Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)

My Lords, in thanking the most reverend Primate the Archbishop for introducing this debate with such excellence, I refer to another spiritual icon of our age, from the cartoon Peanuts. In a wonderful cartoon, in which a character sits fishing by the side of a river, he says: “I don’t want a city on Mars. I don’t want AI in every app. I don’t want data centers in space. I want clean water. I want affordable health care. I want bees to survive”. Most of our lives are about basic things, not extremes, and we need to treasure the basic things before we get enveloped in the externalities. Albert Einstein in his final years warned: “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots”. It is up to all of us who are involved in education and universities— I chair one, am chancellor of another and professor of leadership at a third. My students, 20,000 of them in the US and here in the UK, treat AI as a utility. It is a bit like McDonald’s on a daily basis: it is not a healthy menu and it does not give choices to avoid extreme addiction. Students and those whom I see on a daily basis, who are the minority in our society, have the ability for careful, analytical and adaptive thinking—well, many of them do. They can also ask complex questions. They can learn to value humanities as much as they value science. But the majority of our society does not have those inbuilt or trained abilities. Therefore, I launch at the Minister a request that we start to treat the understanding of AI and the technology linked to it, good as it is in so many wonderful ways, as an emerging and serious addiction. In the same way that health departments recognised that it was important to have public campaigns to lead us to understand the addictive nature of tobacco and alcohol, we must now understand the addictive nature of AI and abusive technologies. We need to be warned about them. It is a public duty. I spent part of this week listening to a group of recent ex-offenders online and in person—10 on Saturday and six on Tuesday night on Zoom. They were being asked to take part in an Oxford University investigation on the role of AI in preventing repeat offending. It was interesting to listen. I said nothing, just listened, as they gave their very careful thoughts, having between them over 126 years of incarcerated time in our prisons. In reflecting on the opportunities of AI—yes, it is easy to come out of prison and immediately there is all your data on the system; a driving licence, an NHS number, a national insurance number and, of course, a higher tax bill—they said three things that were, rightly, warnings. First, they had spent literally decades without technology and were intrinsically suspicious of how data transfer and drift will lead to manipulation of their lives. That is relevant not just to those who are ex-offenders but to anyone who carries risk in the nature of their past. That risk can be transferred by data systems that are interested not in respecting human dignity but just in getting the job done. Secondly, they warned against assumptions that AI-driven health knowledge was the right knowledge, given that many of them have profiles where the difficult issues that led them to prison are assumed to be their continuing reality—in other words, once depressed, maybe even once highly negative, they remain so. Therefore, health solutions given by AI doctors since coming out of prison have always encouraged them towards anti-depressant systems, even when they do not feel that way. Thirdly, they highlighted the ways in which AI pushes the possibilities of suicidal thinking. Some have felt that pressure. They rightly warn us that we need to prepare ourselves to be better and highly educated, very cautious and risk-centric and to treat AI for what it is: a benefit that, a bit like too much McDonald’s, destroys the whole soul, let alone the body.