Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2019
I am grateful to the minister for securing time for the debate. I am not convinced that any of us understand the full magnitude of the changes that Al and data technologies will make to our lives and the lives of our constituents. The world around us is changing at an unprecedented rate—some people call it the fourth industrial revolution. Just today, the first autonomous bus trials were announced for my constituency, in which commuters will be taken from Ferry Toll in North Queensferry to Edinburgh Park station.
The internet has, in the past two decades especially, utterly changed how we interact with one another, how we work, how we shop and how we travel. Al and advances in robotics will do the same over the next two decades.
We need to welcome the advent of new technologies and the opportunities that they bring. However, people who do not have adaptable skills could be badly affected by a rapidly changing economy, so we need to prepare for that now.
The Office for National Statistics says that 1.5 million workers in Britain are at “high risk” of losing their jobs to automation. Women and part-time workers would be most affected. More than 25 per cent of supermarket checkout assistants have gone since 2011.
This morning, we learned that hundreds of jobs in Edinburgh could be lost to automation over the next three years. The Phoenix Group is one of Edinburgh city’s biggest private sector employers, and it is reported that 500 jobs could go as a result of work being transferred to Tata Consultancy Services. I would be grateful if, in closing, the minister could advise us whether the Scottish Government has had any discussions with the company about that plan.
Alongside financial services jobs, manufacturing, retail and transport jobs are among those that are at risk. New technologies can create high-paid, high-skill jobs, or they can replace jobs and turn us into low-wage drones.
Liberal Democrats have long argued that in order to cope we will need massive investment in education, skills and training. Few people nowadays have just one career; automation means that that could be the case for many more of us. The ability to retrain and learn new skills at every stage of life will become ever more important. Some 80 per cent of primary schoolchildren will do a job that does not yet exist, so it is vital that we gear up our skills economy for that reality. The Liberal Democrats want, for example, to repair Scotland’s colleges and replace the lost 140,000 places. Opportunities have evaporated for people who can study only part-time.
In the future, caring responsibilities, or the need to keep working, must not exclude anyone from developing their skills. Scotland will need to make the most of the diverse talents of all our people. The best way to build a high-wage, high-skill economy for the long term is to invest in their talents and wellbeing. That starts with the core skills of logic, verbal reasoning and creativity being learned at school, or even earlier.
Getting it right in the education system will help the United Kingdom to lead the world in the development of inclusive Al and automation. Staying ahead will need huge investment in research and development.
Innovation needs to happen within a framework. It needs to be ethical, as the minister said, and it needs to respect people’s fundamental rights—not least, the rights to privacy and non-discrimination. We have already seen how technologies can move much faster than legislators and policy makers. Our laws are in the closed-circuit television era, while authorities and companies deploy facial recognition technology and more.
The amount of knowledge and information that are at our fingertips is mind-boggling, but it appears that misinformation is a bigger problem than ever before. In just a few short years, technology has utterly changed the landscape of elections across democracies. We are still struggling to get to grips with Twitter trolls, Twitter bots, fake news, huge volumes of paid advertising and even election tampering.
Trying to deal with the implications of tech and data misuse after the fact, in the absence of proper legislative frameworks, leaves people entirely vulnerable.
Left unchecked, every great liberating change will bring terrible risks and problems too. As my federal leader, Jo Swinson, put it:
“New technologies can help us make better decisions, or they could embody the worst of human thinking. Artificial intelligence”,
by its nature, “learns from us”.
One system for predicting reoffending that is used by judges, the police and parole officers in the United States has been proved not to be colour-blind. Black defendants who did not reoffend were nearly twice as likely to be misclassified as higher risk than their white counterparts.
Algorithms can discriminate, too. That is why Liberal Democrats have proposed introducing a Lovelace code of ethics that would ensure that use of personal data and of Al are unbiased, transparent, accurate and respect privacy. All courses relating to digital technologies should teach ethics and there should be a kitemark for companies that meet the highest ethical standards. That would help people to make informed choices about to whom they give their money and data.
That is why we have some sympathy with the Green amendment—we believe that on the global stage, when it comes to warfare and the deployment of the military industrial complex, we need a new version of the Geneva convention to recognise weapons-grade technology in the AI world.
In conclusion, Al and data-driven technologies present huge opportunities for our economy and our society. I am optimistic and positive that they can help us to build a brighter future. They can make our world a better place, but there is a huge amount of work to be done by both Scotland’s Governments to ensure that they do not leave people or ethics behind in the process.