Digital Understanding

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, on her excellent opening speech and her extraordinary career so far. Apropos of what the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, said, I note that quite a few noble Lords were looking at their devices while he was speaking, and he has so far looked at his device three times since he finished speaking.

Do we need improved digital understanding at all levels of our society? You bet we do. I completely buy the distinction made by the noble Baroness between digital skills and digital understanding, and digital understanding is absolutely central to the next few years in our society and in the world at large. The digital revolution is a huge wave of change breaking across the world and transforming our largest institutions but also intimate aspects of our personal lives. The digital revolution is not the internet; the digital revolution is not robotics; the digital revolution is not awesome algorithmic or supercomputing power. It is all three of these, producing a pace of change unknown previously. The pace of change today far outstrips the industrial revolution and it is far more immediately global. It is a whole new world, which we are being plunged into at almost the speed of light. As other noble Lords have said, it is a vast mixture of opportunities and threats. The opportunities are very large. Consider, for example, the overlap between supercomputing power and genetics. Genetics is simply information, and as supercomputers deal in the awesome power of information, there will be fantastic advances in medicine, but the threats are just as large and are everywhere.

I have three quick points. First, the huge digital corporations must be held to account in relation to democratic processes and concerns, and this must happen quickly. Our lives have been invaded. Data are kept, in enormous amounts, on all of us. We cannot simply accept this as it stands. Secondly, as citizens, we cannot just sit back and accept a situation where human beings are programmed out of key technologies. Smart machines can be designed either to replace us or to enhance and extend our capabilities. When it comes to the distinction between AI and what has been called IA—intelligence augmentation—we should push for the second of these. This is a very serious issue. Thirdly, direct human contact should be preserved and sometimes reintroduced. “Back to the future” is a good way of handling advanced technologies. Let us reintroduce human contact wherever we can where at the moment we have robotic automated voices. Let us contain and humanise the robots.