Large Language Models and Generative AI (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it is with even greater apprehension that I stand after hearing that learned disquisition, which I shall re-read in Hansard to make sure that a person whose intellectual background is in medieval literature, theology and Caribbean history might have a chance to get hold of some of the key concepts. I am most grateful that the noble Lord has exemplified the progress that is being made in science to give us tools at our disposal that might greatly enhance many aspects of contemporary living.

I say my own word of thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, for her man and woman management of the committee. I am not an easy man to manage at any time and am capable of eruptions, which she gave me some scope for. I also share her commendation for Dan, who has now moved on to higher things.

The noble Baroness will remember that, at the outset of the committee’s concerns, Professor Wooldridge from Oxford, a colleague of the noble Lord, Lord Tarassenko, urged us to take a positive look at this subject—granting that there were both positives and negatives but not to dwell on the negatives but try to maintain a focus on the positive. The noble Baroness, and other members of the committee, will remember that I expressed a dissentient view at that time. I was very worried by some of the implications of the science we were looking at and the developments in the field under study. It was rather nice to hear the noble Lord, Lord Strasburger, make his contribution and create the same tone of approach to this subject as I would want to make.

I bored the committee more than once by explaining how, 30 years ago, I met a man called Joseph Rotblat. Professor Rotblat was a nuclear physicist who had been recruited for the Manhattan Project and had withdrawn from it when he realised that the need that had created the project—the fact that Germany was developing atomic weapons—had ceased. He had given his help to the Manhattan Project, which would give the Allied cause the possibility of replying to, or deterring, the use of such weapons, but when the Germans ceased their operations and research he withdrew from the project because he did not want his science to be used in this military way and for those purposes. He set up a series of conferences—the Pugwash conferences—that took place regularly down the years and for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

My conversations with Professor Rotblat, when I was just a young callous youth and knew little about these things, has educated me in one principle: I can only admire the findings of science and the work of scientists, but I recognise that the findings of science when monetised or militarised take the very brilliance that has been unearthed and developed in potentially very dangerous directions. It took someone who knew about that from the inside when it came to nuclear developments to warn the world and to keep alive the flame of understanding of the dangers of such uses.

I mention that in this debate because my point in offering that memory was the conviction that out of the very engine room of those developing the present scientific advances, we need to hear the voices that are going to help us because what can we do? Legislation, as we have heard, is already behind the curve. Elon Musk, with his spaceships and the rest of it, is taking something in a direction nobody can calculate. I wonder whether his middle name is Icarus. We will see, will we not?

For all that, this very day the American newspapers are announcing that Brendan Carr has been appointed by Donald Trump as his Federal Communications Commission man—a man with a long record of deregulation, of taking all the constraints off what he calls the constitutional freedom of Americans of free speech and free intellectual activity. So we may be overregulated, but soon we are going to be quite heavily underregulated, and once the world is in that cauldron of competing and keeping up with each other or outrunning each other, we will be in a dangerous place.

I know this makes me seem like Eeyore, the depressed donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh. Indeed, if I took the time, I could go around the committee—their faces are in my head—and give equivalents for them. I can certainly see the honey searcher over there, but there are also Rabbit, Kanga, Roo, Tigger and Piglet. They were all sitting there discussing large language machines. We now know that we can put an extra M in, and no doubt by the time we have a debate next year there may be yet another M to put in because things are advancing fast.

I urge Members of this House and our sector of British society to try to encourage people like Geoffrey Hinton, who has been mentioned, who know what they are talking about, are at the front edge of it all and see the pluses and the minuses to help the rest of us, the Eeyores, the depressed donkeys of this world, to have a better grasp of things and to feel that we are genuinely safe in the world that we are living in.