Department for Science, Information and Technology: Abolition
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord raises a series of very important issues. First, I put on record my absolute thanks for the work done by my noble friend Lord Vallance, who it has been a pleasure and privilege to work with. Noble Lords will appreciate—there have been many comments in your Lordships’ House today—that there are ongoing appointments in government, so I cannot possibly talk about any further roles and appointments that are being made, including my own. We will deal with those as they emerge.
On the substance of the Question, the noble Lord raises an important point but the Government have decided that having science and AI sit separate and away from the rest of government means that other departments have not treated them in the way they should be. Noble Lords will appreciate that a month has not passed when I have not been asked about the impact of AI on the Cabinet Office, and every member of the Front Bench has been asked how AI is affecting the Government’s work. It is right that we are putting both science and AI at the heart of government, which is why we have the new Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet to make sure that it is at the centre, as well as having a new specialist Minister for AI attending Cabinet.
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that there is a real danger here of exactly the wrong signal being sent to the science community? First, there is the departure of one of the most successful Science Ministers of recent years—I say that as one of his predecessors from long ago—the noble Lord, Lord Vallance. More importantly, structurally, there is the abolition and fragmentation of DSIT. The establishment of DSIT promoted the idea that science must permeate all departments of government but now the signal is the opposite to that, which is a regrettable development. That idea is seen by many in the science community as being destroyed.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord makes an interesting point, but it is also incredibly important that we talk about AI, and more broadly its impact on science and what is changing, as something that should be at the heart of government and central to every department. There has not been a subject matter that I have discussed in your Lordships’ House from this Dispatch Box where I have not been asked about the impact of new tech, whether that is the Cabinet Office, the Civil Service Pension Scheme, how we do resilience or even the role of ethics and integrity in the development of AI. It affects every part of my portfolio and that of every one of my colleagues. This is about making sure that AI is at the centre and ensuring that both science and technology are part of our aims and efforts to ensure that there is growth in every postcode, as the Prime Minister has made clear.
Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)
My Lords, like the noble Lord, I congratulate the most reverend Primate on this very timely debate and her powerful speech, which will repay reading carefully. I also am delighted to follow the former leader of the Mendip District Council, who at least knows where North Hill is, and I agree with almost every word of his speech as well.
I am going to be accused, no doubt, by some of my colleagues—perhaps even one or two sitting on my right—of crying wolf, because I too am going to call for regulation. But I remind noble Lords that at the end of the fairy tale there is a real wolf. As recursive self-improvement arrives—it may have already arrived—and machines can design machines more intelligent than themselves without our intervention and our control, we are in a completely new world, pace President Milei of Argentina in the Financial Times yesterday. As my late friend Jim Lovelock, he of the Gaia hypothesis, used to say at the end of his long life, “Of course machines are the next stage in evolution. But it’ll be all right: they’ll keep some of us in a zoo for sentimental reasons”. I am not entirely sure I want my grandchildren to live in a zoo.
As the Pope points out, this industrial revolution, unlike the nuclear revolution, is different. It is more like the first one, because the origins of it all come in the private sector, and the Governments are trailing along behind. Among those founders, there are very good people. I happen to believe, like the noble Lord who has just spoken, that in Demis Hassabis we have not only a near genius but a man with a strong moral compass. The work that he and John Jumper did to solve the protein folding problem with AlphaFold is of huge benefit to medicine.
But then there is a potential wolf. Have a look at Evo 2, also a triumph of huge potential, trained on, I believe, 9 trillion nucleotides. It can read the entire blueprint of life. It is in open source. It has guardrails in it, but there are those who say those guardrails can already be got around, for those who want to seek to weaponise bioweapons. We need the humanities to remind us of the possibilities. The most reverend Primate referred to CS Lewis—have a look again at That Hideous Strength of 1945. Have a look at a rather different sort of writer, Gore Vidal, who imagined in Kalki a mad religious purifier wanting to purify the world of sin with a bioweapon. He wrote that in 1978. We need our humanities departments to help us think about the issues here and not leave it to the techies, wonderful though many of them are. Our humanities departments in universities are under very great pressure at the moment. We need philosophers; we need people like Iain McGilchrist reminding us of the left brain/right brain division. We need the Pope, and we need the right reverend Primate, to remind us of humanity.
We need to move fast. A recent study by Barclays Bank predicts that between 70% and 90% of the jobs in installation and repair, manufacturing, construction and warehousing may be taken by humanoid robots—they will be humanoid, because the world is built by us to fit humans—and that will happen over the next 10 to 15 years. So 70% to 90% of those jobs may be gone.
We in this country, thanks partly to the patriotism of Demis Hassabis, Geoffrey Hinton and others, are players in this world. We have a constellation of start-ups and of people thinking about these issues, which makes us among the principal three in the world—far behind America and China, but significant. Thanks to the former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, we are in a good position in relation to regulation, because our AISI is widely regarded as among the best of its kind in the world. So yes, we must encourage our start-ups and, yes, we must find wider pools of capital to support them, as the Government are trying to do, to be fair to them. Yes, we must think of regulation.
My final, and short, point is this. We must not be nationalistic about this technology. We made that terrible mistake with nuclear. A predecessor of mine as Minister of Science, much more distinguished than me, who subsequently sat on the Woolsack, said that it was near treason to select the PWR reactor rather than the AGR reactor, because the first was American and the second was all British. Poppycock. We should buy what is best. We should make the public sector an intelligent and careful buyer, but we should not fail to buy the best, from wherever it is produced.
Cabinet Manual: Guidelines for Government Formation
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I am delighted to see my noble friend back in his place; we have missed him—I believe everyone has had their Weetabix this afternoon. Fundamentally, what is so important about the Cabinet Manual is making sure that the conventions and precedents are outlined so that, regardless of who is in power and what events are before us, there is a document to guide Ministers and civil servants about how we respond to them.
Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)
My Lords, will the Minister accept on behalf of this one member of the Constitution Committee, which has repeatedly asked for the manual to be updated, that it is singularly satisfying to have this Answer on the day when the once and future chair of the Constitution Committee, my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, has just taken his seat on these Benches again? Does she agree that the manual contains very important parts of our conventional constitutional structure and its updating is much to be welcomed?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord raises an important point, and I welcome all our colleagues back to their place. With regard to the Cabinet Manual, the reality is that it has not been updated since 2011. It considers us still to be a member of the European Union, and it reflects not just the Fixed-term Parliaments Act but a different set of relationships we had with the devolved assemblies. It needs updating to make sure that government and civil servants have the guidance before them.