Artificial Intelligence in Weapon Systems Committee Report

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Friday 19th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton. Like him, I congratulate the committee’s chair, the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, and thank him for securing an early debate on the report, for his comprehensive and powerful opening speech and for his adroit and inclusive chairing of the committee. It is most important in these circumstances to have a chair who is inclusive. It was a pleasure to serve under his chairmanship and it is an equal pleasure to recognise and thank the clerks, the staff and advisers for their exemplary support.

The report and the record of its proceedings contain a great deal that is of value, including testimony from a range of experts which would repay concerted attention from Ministers and officials. Mindful of the time constraint, I wish to focus on one specific area: our working definition of AWS, or rather, the absence of one, which presents very real difficulties, both domestic and international.

The gateway through which I entered this somewhat Kafkaesque debate was a sentence from the Ministry of Defence which purported to explain why this country does not have an agreed definition of AWS. Cited on page 4 of the report and intermittently thereafter, it suggests that we do not have a working definition of AWS because, as the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, has quoted more broadly than I will, such terms

“have acquired a meaning beyond their literal interpretation”.

The floor of your Lordships’ House is not an appropriate forum for a detailed textual exegesis, although I do enjoy that. However, that sentence recalled Hazlitt’s criticism of the oratory of William Pitt, which he stigmatised as combining

“evasive dexterity, and perplexing formality”.

This impression reflects the conclusion of the committee that this explanation is plainly insufficient. How can we actively seek to engage with policy in regulating AWS if we cannot find even provisional words with which to define it? It is like attempting to make a suit for a man whose measurements are shrouded in secrecy and whose very existence is merely a rumour. These are, of course, enormously complex questions but in making good policy, complexity should not be a refuge but a rebuke. It is the job of Governments of any political stripe to be able to articulate their approach and have it tested by experts and dissenting voices.

In advising the Government to adopt a definition, the committee was careful. While it suggested that a future-proofed definition would be desirable, the report makes it clear that even a more provisional operational definition would be useful. We understand that this could change as the technology dictates, but it would at least have the advantage of reflecting the Government’s contemporary thinking. In lieu of that, we are forced to make a series of inferential leaps in guessing details of the Government’s approach to this question. We are given to understand that the Government use the NATO definition of “autonomous”, which takes us a small step forward, although as the report makes clear, that leaves terms such as “desired”, “goals”, “unpredictable” and, extraordinarily, “parameters”, entirely undefined.

Questions about an agreed definition have vexed policymakers in other domestic and international fora, but we should at least be working towards a definition that would bring some measure of clarity to our regulatory and developmental efforts. I would urge, therefore, the Minister to reconsider the question of an operational definition.

In so doing, I remind the Minister of the evidence of Professor Stuart Russell, who noted that the lack of specificity was creating damaging ambiguity in intergovernmental co-operation, and of Professor Taddeo’s concern that the current definitional latitude allows unscrupulous states to develop AWS without ever describing them as such, and her further exhortation upon this Government to develop

“a definition that is realistic, that is technologically and scientifically grounded, and on which we can find agreement in international fora to start thinking about how to regulate these weapons”.