AI Systems: Risks

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Fairfax, for securing this debate. I begin from a position of some scepticism. As many experts say, there is a great deal of hype around AGI—so-called human-level intelligence—but increasing numbers of experts are saying that, unless we get to at least physically embodied intelligence, the large language model-type approach will never get us to that point.

However, my intervention is about a different risk from the generative AI being promoted so much now: resilience. It starts with an incident that is not about AI at all. I shall take noble Lords to Berlin on Saturday, where 45,000 households—including some 2,000 businesses, four hospitals, 74 care homes and 20 schools—found themselves without power. It was not until Wednesday that a significant number of those were reconnected. Unsurprisingly, in Berlin there is now a lot of discussion about vulnerability and today, our own local think tank, the Council on Geostrategy, is highlighting how by cutting just 60 undersea cables, or a percentage of those, we could see a 99% cut in data flows. Imagine the financial impacts and the impacts in societal chaos.

To make this practical, I note that the Government are funding Northumberland County Council, through the £200 million flood and coastal innovation programmes, to trial a flood prediction service for six catchments in that county that are particularly vulnerable to flash floods. Such flashy catchments have a big problem with traditional models of flood warning, so maybe AI can provide the solution. But of course, that is dependent on electricity, data flows and cyber systems that are functional and have not been hit by some kind of malevolent force.

More than that, what kind of data are we relying on? Is it spoiled or polluted data? It is not impossible to imagine that being through human agency. I see that Northumberland is also trialling the use of AI in considering flood risk in planning applications. There could be a lot of money at risk there. Even if there is not an active agent, is it taking adequate account of the changing weather resulting from the climate emergency? Maybe with enough data it could allow for that, but would it also allow for changing human behaviour, ageing populations or loss of trust in authority?

There is a temptation to regard any judgment made by a computer system, even more any judgment by something labelled as AI, as somehow infallible or at least preferable to on-the-ground human experience and knowledge. That is a by-product of far too many people at the head of such AI programmes regarding themselves as somehow superior to other human beings—but they are not. They are just as fallible and multiply their fallibility in their systems.