Advanced Artificial Intelligence

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, let me join the queue in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on his stellar career to date and his excellent speech. He will bring an enormous amount to your Lordships’ House, especially his depth of knowledge in the area we are discussing.

ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI have taken the world by storm. I am a social scientist, but I have spent several years studying AI and we have never seen anything like this: every day around the world, the media has stories about the evolution of AI. This is a quite extraordinary phenomenon.

As we all know, the regulatory problems are huge, and Governments everywhere are scrambling to keep up. Extremely distinguished scientific figures, such as Geoffrey Hinton, just mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Fairfax, have declared generative AI to be an existential threat to humanity. I do not wholly agree with this; it is awesome that human consciousness might be replicated and even improved on, in some sense, but the whole structure of science depends on social institutions. We cannot simply replace that by machines. I think there is a progressive merging of human beings and intelligent machines, and I do not see much of a way back.

In the meantime, a host of other organisations such as schools and universities, where I work, is struggling to cope with much more mundane problems such as how to ensure that students are actually the authors of the academic work they produce. That does not sound like much, but it is a big issue on the ground.

From its earliest origins, AI has been linked to geopolitics and war. It was created not by Silicon Valley but by ARPA and DARPA, the huge research programmes set up by the US Government in response to Russia’s Sputnik 2, which carried Yuri Gagarin into space. Regulatory efforts today, as in previous eras, are likely to be dislocated on a global level by current geopolitical tensions, especially those involving Russia, China and the West.

The most extensive plan for regulation that I have seen is that developed by the EU. As with our Government’s programme, its aim is to balance opportunity and risk, although there are lots of huge issues still unresolved in all this. I support that ambition but it will be very difficult to achieve, given that the pace and scope of innovation has accelerated off the wall. This time, much of it is driven by digital start-ups rather than the huge digital corporations, and it is genuinely global.

Is there anyone in the Chamber who does not have their smartphone close at hand? Even I have mine in my pocket, although I sort of hate it. The smartphone in your pocket has much more intelligence than many machines that we have created, including those that took human beings to the moon. This is quite extraordinary stuff.

As was announced only about two days ago in the US, ChatGPT will become available to smartphone users across the world. Imagine the impact of that, given that the proportion of the world’s population with access to a smartphone has risen to 84%. It will be absolutely awesome. I make a strong plea to the Government Front Bench to have a far more extensive debate about these issues, because they are so fundamental to a whole range of political, social and economic problems that we face.