Advanced Artificial Intelligence

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, the seemingly superhuman achievements of AI are enabled by a greater processing speed and memory storage of computers compared to flesh and blood brains. AI can cope better than humans with data-rich, fast-changing networks—traffic flow, electric grids, image analysis, et cetera. China could have a planned economy of the kind that Mao could have only dreamed of.

However, the societal implications are ambivalent here already. In particular, how can humans remain in the loop? If we are sentenced to a term in prison, recommended for surgery or even given a poor credit rating, we would expect the reasons to be accessible to us and contestable by us. If such decisions were entirely delegated to an algorithm, we would be entitled to feel uneasy, even if presented with compelling evidence that, on average, the machines make better decisions than the humans they have usurped.

AI systems will become more intrusive and pervasive. Records of our movements, health and financial transactions are in “the cloud”, managed by multinational quasi-monopolies. The data may be used for benign reasons—for instance, medical research—but its availability to internet companies is already shifting the balance of power from governments to globe-spanning conglomerates.

Clearly, robots will take over much of manufacturing and retail distribution. They can supplement, if not replace, many white-collar jobs: accountancy, computer coding, medical diagnostics and even surgery. Indeed, I think the advent of ChatGPT renders legal work especially vulnerable. The vast but self-contained volumes of legal literature can all be digested by a machine. In contrast, some skilled service-sector jobs—plumbing and gardening, for instance—require non-routine interactions with the external world and will be among the hardest to automate.

The digital revolution generates enormous wealth for innovators and global companies, but preserving a humane society will surely require redistribution of that wealth. The revenue thereby raised should ideally be hypothecated to vastly enhance the number and status of those who care for the old, the young and the sick. There are currently far too few of these, and they are poorly paid, inadequately esteemed and insecure in their positions. However, these caring jobs are worthy of real human beings and are far more fulfilling than the jobs in call centres or Amazon warehouses which AI can usurp. That kind of redeployment would be win-win. However, AI raises deep anxieties; even in the short-term, ChatGPT’s successors will surely confront us, writ large, with the downsides of existing social media: fake news, photos and videos, unmoderated extremist diatribes, and so forth.

Excited headlines this year have quoted some experts talking about “human extinction”. This may be scaremongering, but the misuse or malfunction of AI is certainly a potential societal threat on the scale of a pandemic. My concern is not so much the science-fiction scenario of a “takeover” by superintelligence as the risk that we will become dependent on interconnected networks whose failure—leading to disruption of the electricity grid, GPS or the internet—could cause societal breakdowns that cascade globally.

Regulation is needed. Innovative algorithms need to be thoroughly tested before wide deployment, by analogy with the rigorous testing of drugs which precedes government approval and release. But regulation is a special challenge in a sector of the economy dominated by a few multinational conglomerates. Just as they can move between jurisdictions to evade fair taxation, so they could evade regulations of AI. How best can the UK help to set up an enforceable regulatory system with global range? It is good news that the Government are tackling this challenge already.

Finally, society will be surely transformed by autonomous robots, even though the jury is out on whether they will be “idiot savants” or will display wide-ranging superhuman intelligence—and whether, if we are overdependent on them, we should worry more about breakdowns and bugs or about being outsmarted, more about maverick artificial intelligence than about real stupidity.