Artificial Intelligence and the Labour Market

Debate between Dean Russell and Lisa Cameron

Wednesday 26th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)]

It is a privilege to speak in this debate, and I thank the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) for securing it. I wanted to apply for it myself—he beat me to the chase, which is a wonderful thing.

Before I became an MP, one of my final clients was in the AI space. It dealt with artificial intelligence and psychology—I believe that my first entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests was my final bit of work for it—so I have seen this technology evolve over many years. We often talk about technology revolutions, but this has been an incredibly fast evolution.

We are seeing Moore’s law, which related to the size and scale of technology, affect society. The scale of what is happening right now is both inspirationally amazing and terrifying at the same time. It will absolutely shape the job market and the type of jobs that come through over the next few years. It will shape how people interface with their co-workers, with technology, with society and with politicians. It will affect every aspect of our lives.

I am particularly concerned about the use of artificial intelligence for deception. I have long said—not necessarily in the Chamber, so I put it on the record now—that there should be in law something that I would call the Turing clause. It would mean that when technology is used to deceive somebody into believing that they are talking to a real person or engaging with a real business, whether for entertainment or for any other purpose—for instance watching a deepfake, which is perhaps for entertainment purposes—it must be crystal clear to them that they are being deceived.

I will give some examples. I was recently speaking to somebody who works in the entertainment industry, running studios where they record sound, voiceovers and music. They said—I should declare that I do not know the scale of this issue and have not looked into the numbers—that lot of the studios are often being used to record voiceovers for AI companies, so that the AI can learn how to speak like a real person. We all know about fraud and scams in which somebody gets phoned up from a call centre and told, “Your insurance is up,” or by someone pretending to be from the Government. We saw, awfully, during the covid crisis how those horrible people would try to scam people. Doing that requires a number of people in a space.

Now imagine that AI can pretend to be somebody we know—a family member, for instance—and imitate their voice. It could call up and say, “I need some money now, because I am in trouble,” or, “I need some support.” Or it could say, “This is somebody from the Government; your tax affairs are an issue—send your details now.” There are a whole load of things going on in society that we will not know about until it is too late. That is why a Turing clause is absolutely essential, so that we are ahead of the curve on deception, deepfakes and areas where technology will be used to fool.

One incredibly important area in relation to the labour market that is not often talked about is the role of AI in creativity. DALL-E 2 is one of the tools, and there are many others popping up now. They can create artwork and videos almost at the speed of thought—typing in a particular phrase will create amazingly beautiful pictures—but they are pooling those from places where real artists and real musicians, with particular styles, have contributed. That is then presented as AI creativity. That could kill the graphic design industry. It could prevent people who are in the early stages of life as an artist, in both the visual and music worlds, from ever having an opportunity to be successful.

Just recently, Drake and the Weeknd—if I have those artists correct—had a song that was put online. I think that it even went on Spotify, but it was definitely on some streaming services. Everybody thought, “Gosh, this is a fantastic new collaboration.” It was not. It was AI pretending to be both of those artists with a brand new song. Artificial intelligence had created it. It was not until after the fact, and after the song had been streamed hundreds of thousands of times, that the big music companies said, “Hang on—that isn’t real. We need to stop this.” Then it was stopped.

In the case of social media, it took us many years to get to the fantastic Online Safety Bill. I was very fortunate to be on the Draft Online Safety Bill Joint Committee. Its Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), is in the room today, and he did a fabulous job. Getting to that point took 10 or 15 years. We do not have 10 or 15 months to legislate on AI. We probably do not have 10 or 15 weeks, given where we will be in a matter of days, with the new announcements and tools that are coming out.

[Dr Cameron]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making those extremely important points. Just last week, we had the Children’s Parliament at the all-party parliamentary group on the metaverse and web 3.0. The children were excited about the opportunities of AI and the metaverse, and we were told on the day that the World Economic Forum predicts that technology will create 97 million new jobs by 2025 alone. But like the hon. Gentleman, they were also very concerned about what is real and what is not, and they were concerned about the mental health impact of spending much of the day in an altered reality setting. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need much more research into the mental health impact on staff and young people who are engaged in AI?

[Dean Russell]

I thank the hon. Member for her comments. Mental health is a passion of mine—I had a ten-minute rule Bill about ensuring that mental health first aiders are in the workplace—and I agree wholeheartedly. We saw that in evidence given to the Draft Online Safety Bill Joint Committee; Rio Ferdinand talked, including in his documentary, about the fact that what is said online can affect a person’s real life. The challenge with artificial intelligence is that it will not just be able to say those things; it will probably know precisely how to do the most harm, how to hit the right triggers to make people buy things and how to fool and deceive people to ensure they hand over money or their rights.

I will move on because I am conscious of time. I know we have quite a long time for this debate, but I do not intend to use it all; I promise. I think that the creativity part is absolutely essential. A few weeks ago, I predicted in Parliament that, in the next year or so, a No. 1 song will be created by artificial intelligence for the first time. I have no doubt that a No. 1 bestselling book will be written by artificial intelligence. I have no doubt that new songs in the voices of artists who are no longer around, such as Elvis Presley, will be released, and that actors who are sadly no longer alive will play starring roles in new films. We are seeing this already on a soft scale, but it is going to become more and more pervasive.

It is not all negative. I do not want to be a doomsayer. There are great opportunities: Britain—this wonderful country—could be the home of identifying and delivering transparency within those industries. We could be the country that creates the technology and the platforms to identify where artificial intelligence is being used; it could flag up when things are not real. It could, for example, force organisations to say who they are, what they are doing and whether they have used artificial intelligence. I think that will create a whole new world of labour markets and industries that will stem from this country and create all the jobs that we talked about earlier.

I am also concerned that we do not often talk in the same breath about artificial intelligence and robotics. In the industrial world, such as in warehouses and so on, there has been a rise in the use of robotics to replace real people. Office jobs are changing due to artificial intelligence. The role of accountants, of back-office staff and of both blue and white-collar workers will change.

As was stated earlier, the challenge with robotics is on things such as defence. Artificial intelligence is being used in robotics to get way ahead of the scale of where we are now. We really need to take that seriously. ChatGPT was probed. People tried to catch it out on different aspects of its response. When asked how it would steal the nuclear codes, it outlined how it would do it. I am not trying to give any bad actors out there any ideas, but it explained how it would use AI to control drones, and how they would be able to go in and do certain things. Hopefully, it got it all wrong. However, if AI is in not just our computers and mobile phones, but in drones and new robots that are incredibly sophisticated, incredibly small and not always identifiable, we need to be really wary.

There are many positives, such as for detection in the health sector and for identifying things such as breast cancer. Recently, I have seen lots of work about how artificial intelligence could be layered on the human aspect and insight, which was mentioned earlier, and enable the identification of things that we would not normally be able to see.

There is huge positive scope for using data. I have said previously that, if we were to donate our health data to live clinical trials in a way that was legitimate and pseudonymised, artificial intelligence could be used to identify a cure for cancer and for diseases that have affected our society for many centuries. In the same way that it has found new ways of playing chess, it might find new ways of changing and saving lives. There is great opportunity there.

Many years ago, I wrote an article called, “Me, Myself and AI”. In it, I commented on areas where AI is dangerous, but I also mentioned opportunities for positives. I would like to make one final point on this: we must also make sure that the data that goes into the AI is tracked not only for things such as royalties in creative industries, but for bias. I wrote an article on that a while ago. If we take a sample, say within a health context, and take that data based on only one ethnicity or demographic, the AI will develop options and solutions for that group. If we do not have the right data, regarding diversity, going into the analysis, we risk not being able to identify future issues. For example, sickle cell disease might get missed because the data that the AI is using is based only on clinical trials with white people.

There is a wide-ranging issue about what is being fed into the systems around AI and how we ensure that we identify where AI is being used—hence my point about a Turing clause when it comes to deception. We also need to know where it is being used, including in Government. We need to look at the opportunities, too: whole new industries around how we monitor AI, apply it and use the science of it.

AI is already there in the spelling of “Great Britain”. We have a great opportunity to be ahead of the curve, and we need to be because the curve will be moving beyond us within a matter of weeks or months—and definitely within years.

Bus Routes: Local Consultation

Debate between Dean Russell and Lisa Cameron

Tuesday 20th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dean Russell (Watford) (Con)]

I rise today for the final Adjournment debate of the year. The topic I am discussing is buses, specifically cancellations and timetables. I am very conscious that I am keeping everyone late, just like some buses for my constituents. More specifically, recent changes to timetables in Watford have caused serious issues for my constituents in their daily lives, whether they are trying to get to work, hospital appointments, GP appointments, or visiting friends and family. My request for a debate follows engagement and correspondence with my local community, including two bus community meetings with constituents. They were held with Arriva, the prominent bus service provider I will be talking about today, but there are other providers and the issues are not limited to Arriva.

[Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing this extremely important and timely debate. Does he agree that bus services are perhaps even more vital in rural areas? I think about my own constituency and Lesmahagow, which has an extremely poor service. One of the new estates in East Kilbride does not have a regular service at all. Surely it is incumbent on us all to work together, across party and across Governments, to ensure that people have vital services, particularly the most vulnerable?

[Dean Russell]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. That is absolutely true in rural areas, but also in urban areas. Bus services provide a really important role for our communities. That role is not political. We do not catch a blue bus or a red bus or a yellow bus—we catch a bus. The reality is that we must all work together. We must find ways to ensure we serve our community in the best way we can.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dean Russell]

I thank my hon. Friend for his point on communications, which is one that I will raise near the end of my speech. Technology allows us to see where Ubers, taxis or online orders are, but that is not common across the board for buses, which makes it even harder if the timetables change and the service is not running on time.

I have gained an understanding of the challenges with timetables by chatting to local residents. When I asked them how long they had known about the changes, they said no one had got on the bus and told them or left a leaflet. Bus users—the people who get on the bus and rely on the buses every day—are not being directly engaged when timetables are changed, but they should be asked whether the changes will have an impact on them.

At the heart of this issue are people, not just numbers. People have the stresses of their daily lives: finishing a shift at work and needing to travel home; getting up in the morning to go to a hospital appointment; there are knock-on effects on all those things. As I will mention a bit later, I have had constituents almost in tears, telling me, “I can’t ask my boss again if I can come in late.” They say, “I’m having to cancel GP or hospital appointments or let them know that I’m going to be late, which might mean that it moves back a week or longer.”

Bus timetables are not just about numbers; we need not just a quantitative review, but a qualitative review that asks people about the potential impact, the challenges and the importance of the route. Even if only a few people use the bus, there might be another way to support them. There are new services such as ArrivaClick that people can order for short journeys, but how can they plan for that if they do not know what sort of journeys they need to take?

For registrations, variations and cancellations of community bus services in England, bus operators are required to give statutory notice of 70 days—28 days’ notice to the local authority and 42 days’ notice to the traffic commissioner—but there is no legal requirement for bus operators to inform passengers of the changes until the cancellation registration has been processed. That is absurd. How on earth can a service be cancelled without asking people? How can they be told only after the decision is made, even though other organisations in the process will have been told weeks or potentially months earlier? It seems very strange.

I have made a request for the county council to review the cancelled service according to value for money criteria when it looks at bus services; I have asked it to look at how that can be supported through its own funding. However, it is not just about the funding of services, but about communications. I am aware that Hertfordshire has a website called Intalink that people can visit to see changes, but that is available after the services have been changed.

As I understand it, Arriva reorganised its network in Hemel and Watford in April, which has resulted in a number of routes being combined. Again, it did not tell bus users or my constituents that that was happening. The Abbots Langley to Watford services were changed: they no longer service St Albans Road and now go via Newhouse Crescent on Woodside. That has meant a loss of access to St Albans Road, with longer journey times. From April, Arriva abandoned the northern section of the 8 service from Watford to Mount Vernon Hospital, meaning a loss of service for the Harebreaks and Maude Crescent areas of Watford. It was replaced and funded at a lower frequency by Hertfordshire County Council’s contract route 9 from Watford town centre to Leavesden Park. Leavesden Park also lost its daytime services into Watford on the 10 and 20 route, which were replaced by the 9 service. Those were major changes for people in my constituency, and they have been a challenge.

I turn to poor service. A big issue in Watford has been the punctuality and reliability of bus services, which have been disappointing for the past year. The Minister may raise the fact that driver shortages have been a major issue; I will have some questions about that subject later. I believe that in this instance the services are about 20 drivers short. Such a large shortage has led to regular cancellations, with resultant overcrowding on the buses that do run.

In my engagement with Hertfordshire County Council, it has been made aware that the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency has contacted Arriva about its services and is working with it to improve punctuality and reliability. Following community engagement, I have written to the council and to Arriva about the matter. I understand that Arriva has given several contracted services outside Watford back to Hertfordshire County Council to free up some bus drivers for the west, which will benefit my constituents. I welcome that measure, which I understand should happen in January, helping the reliability of the services: I believe that it will free up 12 drivers.

I appreciate that Arriva recognises the issues that have been caused by unreliable service and has been engaging with Hertfordshire County Council, but we need to ensure that we keep up the pressure on bus companies. We have had many debates in this Chamber about train services that have caused major issues for local residents. Issues with buses may not be as prominent in people’s minds, because they are very local, but when we are looking at the bigger picture across the country we have to ensure that they are addressed.

Poor communication, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) raised, is an issue that needs to be fixed much sooner.



Sadly, as I said earlier, I have seen bus users at community meetings almost in tears because they simply cannot fathom how a service could be so bad—a service on which they rely so much just to get to work, or to get home at night. They may know that their kids, on the way home from school, are stuck at some bus stop in the dark, in poor weather, and may not be sure whether they will get home on time or whether they should try to leave work early and find a way of going to fetch them.

This is an awful experience, and I have to say that it is not alien to me. I grew up not in Watford but in the west midlands, and many years ago I worked at Birmingham airport. I worked all sorts of shifts: 6 am to 2 pm, 2 pm to 10 pm, and, often, the night shift. This probably would not be allowed now, but back in the 1990s I worked 24-hour shifts. I have stood at bus stops at 9 pm, or 10 pm, or when a shift has finished early, in the dark, waiting for a bus that does not come, not knowing when the next one will arrive, and not knowing what decision to make. Have all the buses been cancelled, or will the bus arrive but drive on past the stop because it is too full to let any more people on?

Anyone who has been a bus user understands that this is not a simple issue. It affects how people feel, it affects their trust in the system and the network, and it leads them to ask themselves, “Should I continue using the bus?” Every time there is an issue, bus use declines, which is why buses are not popular and why routes are not changed. This, as I have said, is not an isolated data-related point; it is about the people who are actually involved.

In the modern era, by means of technology such as apps, websites and indicator screens at bus stops, it is possible to have much better information, via GPS, about where vehicles are. We see it all the time with taxis nowadays: we can physically see where a taxi is after it has been ordered. If we are at a bus stop and we know that there will not be a bus for an hour, at least we can plan around that, but standing for minute after minute wondering whether the bus is going to come and what is going to happen is a massive issue. The bus companies have an excellent opportunity to look at how they use their apps and other technology, and how they can ensure that timetables are better indicated.

[Dr Cameron]

This reminds me of a point that was raised with me just the other week by representatives of East Kilbride Visually Impaired Bowling Club, which relies on communications on buses as well as indications of when buses will arrive. They described the progress being made on “talking buses”, enabling visually impaired people to know which stop to get off at and where they are in their journey. Does the hon. Gentleman, who is making a fantastic point about communications, agree that progress on these vital issues is extremely important to inclusion in public transport?

[Dean Russell]

Absolutely, and it is important for accessibility as well. People with disabilities have spoken to me about their own concerns. All the buses are accessible, but if a bus does not turn up or stops in a place that is not itself accessible, the problems are exacerbated.

I am conscious of the time and I want to hear the Minister’s response, so I will try to speed up and make sure that we arrive at our destination—the end of the Adjournment debate—before Christmas. I know that the Government are investing a lot in transport, and I am not trying to be political or to do nothing but criticise.

Hertfordshire County Council has been given £29.7 million for the bus service improvement plan as part of the £3 billion bus back better strategy, which is great news. The allocation of funding has been broken up for the next three years across five towns including Watford, and I am very grateful for that. Half of it is capital to invest in the buses themselves, and the other half is revenue to invest in ticketing. I understand that funding can also be used for new services or to enhance current successful services, but I think we should look at the less successful services, and ask why they are less successful and whether we need to support them further. I realise that funding cannot be used to subsidise services that are non-commercially viable or withdrawn, but, again, if we know the reasons why they are not working, perhaps we can find ways to support them.

We have had some other recent successes. The W19 bus route, which is mostly run commercially by Red Rose Buses, was set to be withdrawn on 26 December. but that was opposed by Carpenders Park’s Conservative county councillors Reena Ranger and Chris Alley and district councillors Rue Grewal, Shanti Mara and David Coltman, working with me. After listening to the views of residents, they submitted some great evidence to Hertfordshire County Council, asking it to save the W19 bus. I am pleased to say that they agreed to increase the funding fivefold to save the W19. The revised timetable is to be registered imminently and the details will appear as soon as possible on the Intalink website. For any residents who might be listening, the service will be renumbered as the 346 and 346A to denote the clockwise and anti-clockwise routings. The key point is that when we have engagement, we can have successes, and it is important that people are listened to.

I will start to round up, as I am conscious of giving the Minister time to respond. When organisations change timetables, it has a major impact on bus users. What might be low user numbers on a spreadsheet could mean the loss of important routes for working people, hospital visits being missed, people being late, careers being impacted and people not being able to pick up their kids on time. There are so many impacts.

I have several asks for the Minister. Will he consider implementing a legal requirement for all companies, commercial or public, that provide a public transport service to ensure local engagement before services are changed or cancelled? Will he highlight the importance of communication and reliability of service? Overall, residents would be happy in some instances with a reduced but reliable service rather than regular cancellations and unannounced diversions. Will he consider supporting the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency to increase the availability of testing appointments for essential services such as the bus service and ambulance drivers, to address the driver shortages, as we saw with the HGV driver shortages? I know about that because my father was an HGV driver, and it is a noble profession.

I am conscious that this is a debate for all areas, even though there can be local issues. I am grateful to the Minister staying late for this final Adjournment debate before Christmas. As I am the last Back-Bench MP to speak before Christmas, may I also take a moment to say thank you to all the staff, to all Members across the House, to the Speaker’s team, to my own team—Victoria, Abigail, Michelle and Jayne—to all the activists who work all year round to help to put us in this place, to my amazing constituents for putting me into this place and finally to my family and friends in what has been a challenging year for many. Hopefully we will have a much more successful new year.