ON THE day after his feast day last Wednesday, St Thomas Aquinas was quoted within the House of Lords in a debate on artificial superintelligence (super AI).
The Bishop of Hereford, the Rt Revd Richard Jackson, called the medieval scholastic theologian “prescient when he said: ‘The biggest minds are able to the best vices in addition to of the best virtues.’ When we make decisions . . . intelligence is but one factor. Of greater value is wisdom.”
The Bishop argued that “our decisions are incessantly motivated by love, which Aquinas defines as ‘to will the great of one other’. . . These things will come together in our deliberations . . . on assisted dying.
“For a few of us, love leads within the direction of permitting a alternative to finish incurable suffering; others are convinced that love demands the retention of the law because it stands to stop coercion of the vulnerable, while in no sense lacking compassion in holding that view. Love drives us to different conclusions. We come to those conclusions, compromise and perhaps even change our minds as we reflect together.
“It is tough to see how this might be captured in an algorithm. Actions flowing from intelligence alone might be very bad ones indeed. . . Early experimental examples of super AI have prioritised their very own survival, even to the extent of threats of blackmail to their programmers when it was proposed to modify them off.”
He concluded: “Until such time as these virtues might be woven into machines, with the protections to shut them down safely, a global moratorium is the one protected way forward.”
Lord Clement-Jones, who had been a co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence for nine years, warned that “currently, no method exists to contain or control smarter-than-human AI systems.” He referred to the Global Call for AI Red Lines, launched on the United Nations, “to stop unacceptable AI risks, including prohibiting superintelligence development, until there may be broad scientific consensus on how it might be done safely and with strong public buy-in.
“The Government’s response has been inadequate. Ministers deal with regulating using AI tools fairly than their development. But this approach fails fundamentally when facing superintelligence. Once a system surpasses human intelligence across all domains, we cannot simply regulate the way it is used.”
Lord Hunt (Labour) had introduced the talk. He mentioned how AI “can bring unprecedented progress, boost our economy and improve public services. We are number three in the worldwide rankings for investment in AI.” But he wanted “to induce the Government to think about constructing safeguards into ASI development to be sure that it proceeds only in a protected and controllable manner, and to hunt international agreement on it”.
He had also been impressed by Baroness Harding’s previous comments about “the Warnock committee’s work on in vitro fertilisation, which helped set a world standard for that practice long before the scientific developments made it possible, which is where we’re with superintelligent AI”. Baroness Warnock (Gazette, 29 March 2019) had, he said, “thought through the moral query before, not after, the technology was available”.
In her response, the federal government minister Baroness Lloyd said that “we want to be sure that that AI stays secure and controllable.” She said that AI “can be a driver of national renewal, and of our ambition to be a world leader in the event and deployment of AI. This is the way in which that may keep us safest of all.”
