Artificial Intelligence in Weapon Systems Committee Report

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Friday 19th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, the chairman of the committee, who was absolutely excellent in the way he carried out the job. I have no doubt that he had somewhat of an advantage over many of the rest of us on the committee, as he had spent quite a lot of time in the House of Commons on the Defence Select Committee, which must have given him great inside knowledge of what was going on in the defence field. That was very useful to all of us.

I am very glad to have been on the committee. I have always believed that, if we are to win wars, we need two major components. First, we have to train and motivate our troops properly. I do not think anybody doubts that the British are world leaders in training the military; indeed, we do it for many other countries as well. The professionalism that our Armed Forces show is the envy of the world. I wish I could say the same of the ability of the Ministry of Defence to procure equipment, which has been lacking for years, even in the days when I was responsible for some of it.

The interesting thing that has changed is that, in the old days, industry used to look to defence to spend taxpayers’ money on research and development, hoping that some of that technology would move over into the private sector and it would benefit. That has all completely changed now. The sums of money that have been spent on research and development by the private tech companies in the United States, for instance, are so enormous that technological change is moving at a very fast rate. Let us face it: defence is benefiting from the private sector rather than the other way around. As a result, technology is moving on so fast that it is very difficult for any of us to keep up with it.

So I am very keen that we should embrace AI. We will be left at a serious disadvantage if our enemies adopt AI with enthusiasm and we do not. It is extremely important that we take this on board and use it to save the lives of our troops and improve our chances of winning wars.

There have been a number of very alarmist stories going around. It caused me a certain amount of concern that the committee might think that this is a business that should be regulated out of business altogether due to the possibility of things going wrong. Indeed, while we were on the committee, there was a report in the newspapers of a piece of AI equipment being trialled by the United States that went completely wrong on the simulator and ended up killing the operator and then blowing itself up. We asked the United States what its reaction had been to this. The answer we got was that it had never happened. That might be true—who knows?—but it is slightly sad as we want to learn lessons from all these things, rather like the airlines do when things go wrong. They share the information with everybody in the business and that makes the whole airline business much safer than it would otherwise be. I imagine that, if this did happen, the United States withdrew the whole system from its inventory and went back to the manufacturers and told them to get their act together and not make these sort of mistakes in the future.

My concerns about the committee being somewhat Luddite were misplaced. The report we have produced recognises that we have to take on AI in our defence equipment and that, if we do not, we will be put at a singular disadvantage.

The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, mentioned the question of international humanitarian law. I am not as much in support of this as perhaps I should be, having signed up to the committee report. I am absolutely certain that nothing whatever is going to happen on this front. The committee was given clear evidence that there is no international agreement to tighten up international humanitarian law. I do not think that we should look to international humanitarian law as an answer to our problems.

The noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, also mentioned the question of nuclear. Unilaterally, we have to ensure that human control remains an element in the whole use of nuclear weapons. I share his concerns about leaving all this to machines: machines can very easily go wrong.

We took a lot of evidence from people who called themselves Stop Killer Robots. I did not understand why so many of them seemed to be put in front of us, but we ended up with these people. When we asked them about Phalanx, they said that this did not apply to that. Your Lordships will know that Phalanx is a point defence system on most of our major Royal Navy ships. It can be used manually or as a completely automated weapons system, identifying targets and opening fire on them if they are coming towards the ship. I would be surprised if it was not being used as an AWS in the Red Sea, where there is the constant threat of Houthi missiles coming in. That system saves the lives of sailors in our Royal Navy.

We should always recognise that AI has a very important role to play. We should be careful about saying that we want to stop all lethal robots, given that they could make all the difference between us winning and losing wars.