Baroness Spielman (Con)

My Lords, like others, I thank the most reverend Primate for making this the subject of today’s debate and for introducing it so admirably. She wisely reminded us that we must pay proper attention to what it means to be human and to protecting truth and trust, which are essential to healthy societies. I am thinking of the parallels with the invention of atom-splitting technologies a few decades ago. We suddenly faced huge opportunities and huge risks at the same time. Both optimism and alarm about AI are fully justified. The asymmetric incentives on AI frontier labs described by the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko, make it too easy for them to give insufficient consideration to harms to humans. I share the view expressedby many today that we need to ensure that there is a strong framework of incentives around AI and that this necessitates clear regulation. Too often, regulation becomes little more than a transfer of decision-making power from innovators and enterprise-builders to Ministers. This is the wrong approach. We should be using the most reverend Primate’s challenge to help define a set of purposes to frame a strong and flexible regulatory approach—of course reflecting optimism and ambition, but it absolutely should be grounded in thinking about what makes good lives. One way to harm humans is to kill or maim them, but another way is to deprive them of purpose and value in life. Humans clearly benefit from the personal, social and workplace relationships that give structure and responsibilities to their lives. A few lucky people have sufficient intrinsic motivation and purpose that they will flourish regardless, but most of us need shared challenges and rewards as well as rights and freedoms. If we accidentally lose these, we will be an unhappier society, and AI will not alter the fundamentals of human psychology. I will speak briefly about education and about younger adults. First, on education, wherever the world takes us, those who are knowledgeable and skilled will have better prospects than those whose potential is underdeveloped. Cognitive psychology shows that we can only think with what we know. We must not abandon knowledge. AI availability does not mean that we should stop teaching our young people to be knowledgeable and skilful and to embrace responsibility and challenge. We must make sure that they do not damage their own learning by offloading the processes of mental development to AI. I think schools are already more alive to the risks here than universities. The higher education sector needs to start discussing, openly and honestly, the undermining of student learning that is already visible to all who look. The other thing I want to talk about is early career incentives. We can already see the impact of AI on entry-level jobs. This is leaving too many young people underoccupied, miserable and potentially alienated, just when they should be coming into their own as adult contributors. To sustain a good society, it is essential to align tax and labour market policies to provide stable incentives to continue hiring and training the young instead of parking them on expensive benefits. The world will continue to evolve in unpredictable ways but trained and participating young people will be more likely and better able to adapt to the new, as they have done in past decades and centuries. AI-linked regulation and government change should have a particularly strong emphasis on the future lives of the young.