I welcome the Bill. Regulation in this space is perhaps more important than any other regulatory Bill we will pass in this House this year. Any new technology poses problems, difficulties, challenges and threats and, undoubtedly, that is true of artificial intelligence. It does not mean we cannot regulate to protect ourselves and it does not mean we cannot put measures in place to protect ourselves and our children. There is a concern about the notion of over-regulation, that we will therefore stifle innovation or prevent people from coming up with new ideas or new technologies. In fairness, artificial intelligence represents one of the greatest achievements of mankind from the point of view of creating something that can grow itself, feed itself and inform itself. That in and of itself should not be overlooked. The danger that comes with that is that we do not control how it feeds itself or how it informs itself. We have already seen the many pitfalls where artificial intelligence will throw up results in a search online or through an artificial intelligence app that are patently false. As a lawyer, I can tell the House that I have seen many instances of that happen in the legal world, thankfully not in this jurisdiction but certainly, if the Internet is to be believed, and frequently it is not, quite a lot in America. You see lawyers in legal cases submit legal submissions which cite cases that never actually occurred. The danger is that artificial intelligence does not have the ethical framework that humans have. It does not have the understanding. It certainly does not have emotional intelligence or any of those things that we factor into human decision-making. We therefore need to put in place regulation to ensure we do not have a raft of falsehoods being propagated by artificial intelligence. Now, that already happens. It happened with the Internet before artificial intelligence. It happens very often at the nefarious hand of humans with normal intelligence, but artificial intelligence can do it on a scale and at a pace we cannot match, so regulation is hugely important there. I do not believe that regulation stifles innovation necessarily. It can, of course, and over-regulation can hold things back. However, one of the things we can say very proudly in Europe is that innovation and regulation are not mutually exclusive; we can have both. We can have regulations that protect us, protect our information systems and protect our children from exposure to these things online, but we can also have an environment that allows entrepreneurs, developers and the creators and the creative people in this world to constantly build new technologies. That is a good thing. Many of the criticisms that are made against artificial intelligence were made against the Internet and the computer and, before that, the machine that sliced bread, if proverbs are to be believed. I am not a Luddite. I do not believe we should not be progressing - of course we should - but we need to progress in a way that can ensure the protection of the citizenry's rights and the integrity of what they view, for example, on the Internet. Reference was made earlier to the fact that anybody who has done a Google search in recent times has used AI, whether they actively consented to it or not. I have an issue with that because nobody asked my consent to enter my search criteria into an AI bot or an AI application. This is the kind of thing for which regulation is needed. If people are to engage with artificial intelligence, they should do so in an informed way and actively consent to doing that. Otherwise they do not really know what is coming back or whether they can rely on the search results that come back. Perhaps what is most important is that, irrespective of what regulations arise from this legislation, people still have to check things themselves. May I make just one point about the drafting? The Bill does not actually define what artificial intelligence is. In section 2, the interpretation section, it does make reference to the European legislative instruments, but it does not actually say what they say. That is a drafting difficulty that means people will have to look up that stuff elsewhere, which can be quite difficult for them.

Sentiment score: 0.25