Advanced Artificial Intelligence

Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of two recent select and scrutiny committees on AI, and as a founding board member of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation.

Together with others, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on this debate, and it is a pleasure to follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton.

We are at a pivotal moment in the development of AI. As others have said, there is immense potential for good and immense potential for harm in the new technologies. The question before us is not primarily one of assessing risk and developing regulation. Risk and regulation must both rest on the foundation of ethics. My fundamental question is: what is the Government’s view on the place of ethics within these debates, and the place of the humanities and civil society in the development and translation of ethics?

In 1979, Pope John Paul II published the first public document of his papacy, the encyclical Redemptor Hominis. He drew attention to humanity’s growing fear of what humanity itself produces—a fear revealed in much recent coverage of AI. Humanity is rightly afraid that technology can become the means and instrument for self-destruction and harm, compared with which all the cataclysms and catastrophes of history known to us seem to fade away. Pope John Paul II goes on to argue that the development of technology demands a proportional development of morals and ethics. He argues that this last development seems, unfortunately, to be always left behind.

Professor Shoshana Zuboff made a similar point on this time lag more recently, in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She wrote:

“We have yet to invent the politics and new forms of collaborative action … that effectively assert the people’s right to a human future”.


These new structures must be developed not by engineers alone but in rich dialogue across society. Society together must ask the big ethical questions. Will these new technologies lead us into a more deeply humane future and towards greater equality, dignity of the person and the creative flourishing of all? Or will they lead us instead to a future of human enslavement to algorithms, unchallenged bias, still greater inequalities, concentration of wealth and power, less fulfilling work and a passive consumerism?

Five years ago the Government established the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation to explore these questions. The centre began well but was never established on an independent legal footing and seems to have slipped ever further from the centre of the Government’s thinking and reflection. One of the hopes of the CDEI was that it would provide an authoritative overview of sector-led innovation, have a co-ordinating and oversight role, and be a place for bringing together public engagement, civil society, good governance and technology. I therefore ask the Minister: what are the Government’s plans for the CDEI in the current landscape? What are the plans for the engagement of civil society with AI regulation and ethics, including with the international conference planned for the autumn? Will the Government underline their commitment to the precautionary principle as a counterweight to the unrestrained development of technology, because of the risks of harm? Will we mind the widening gap between technology and ethics for the sake of human flourishing into the future?