Oral evidence: Robotics and artificial intelligence, HC 145Tuesday 28 June 2016
Oral evidence, 28 June 2016.
Witnesses
Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer, Microsoft, and Mike Wilson, General Industry Sales Manager, ABB Robotics, gave evidence.
Chair
Thank you for coming today. I saw that you were listening intently throughout the previous discussion, so I will jump right in with the impact of AI and robotics on the workforce. You heard some different views from the previous panel, and we heard some other evidence in our last session. Where do you stand on this? Do you think it will eliminate jobs? Will it create new forms of employment that will compensate? Mike Wilson, what do you think we need to do to prepare society to respond effectively?
Mike Wilson
I look at this from a manufacturing industry perspective, because that is my background. To date, robots and automation have taken over the dirty, demanding and dangerous jobs, generally the ones people do not want to do, and they have added value to the manufacturing workplace. I think we will start to see increased use of robots throughout manufacturing. It has already been said that sectors like the UK automotive industry are a lot more productive than they used to be because they have employed a lot of automation. Likewise, they have also employed thousands and thousands more people who otherwise would not have been employed. Earlier, it was touched on that generally across UK manufacturing we do not use as many robots as our major industrial competitors. We use about 31 robots per 10,000 employees in manufacturing, whereas Germany is up to about 160, so we are well behind. The challenge we face is that we need to accelerate that; we need to put more robots into our manufacturing facilities so that our workers are given the tools to be more productive. Ultimately, it is all about making workers work smarter rather than work harder. We should push for greater use of automation; ultimately, that will make businesses more competitive and therefore they will employ more people. We will get more jobs out of it, but we’ll get better jobs.
Dave Coplin
I worry about the line of questioning, not just today, but across society. The conversation is all about humans versus machines, and that sets us off on the wrong foot. Technology has never been about humans versus machines. The story, certainly from our perspective, in the personal computer revolution is about how we augment humanity and how we enable human beings to rise up and achieve more than they could on their own. Rather than talk about automation and labour saving, we should talk about creativity. We should talk about how we can help people to achieve more than they could on their own—your point, Mike. If you start in that place, the way forward starts to emerge as a very different path. It is not about massive disruption in the workforce but about how we create new markets and new opportunities. Then we move very quickly away from the regulation of robots and AI to how we create the pipeline of skills to feed that. That is where we have to go with this stuff.
Chair
To follow exactly from that, and from Professor Luckin’s comment about the issues in the UK, which we have just reported on in our digital skills report, we have a STEM skills crisis in the UK, but we also have issues with basic skill levels. How do we address that? What kinds of skills do we need to bring into the workplace to deal with blended tasks, and with automated tasks not just for basic uses but for the creative and innovative uses we would all hope to see?
Dave Coplin
For me, we have to try to stop separating them. We talk a lot about STEM, which is really important—don’t get me wrong—but, without art and creativity, innovation is dead. We could have a bunch of scientists, which would be brilliant, but their ability to be creative in the future world of work is the thing that makes them successful. We have done a great job in the UK. We should be proud about how we put computer science in the curriculum, but we have to take the next step, because we should be looking to ensure that every member of our society is equipped to be able to use technology to deliver a positive outcome in their lives, regardless of whether or not they want to be a computer scientist. How do we do that? We have to inspire people. It goes back a bit to the conversation about the rhetoric and the imagery we have for computers and robots today, which is a dystopian view. Where are the good role models and the things where we can say, “Look how creative this individual has been as a combination of their human skills—empathy and creativity—and their ability to manipulate the technology to deliver a great outcome”? That is the narrative we need in education, and that is why we need to inspire kids. We do not need to frighten them off with a bunch of science; we need to show them how creative they can be and how it is a blended world. If we can get that right, we will solve all sorts of things, like the gender issues we face in attracting people into science and technology; we will extend resolution of some of the problems we face because we will have a more creative approach. But I fear that, as long as we talk about STEM in exclusivity of the other skills that will be required, we limit our ability to be successful.
Chair
Mike Wilson, this is an argument for the STEAM agenda—STEM plus the arts—which as a musician I can only endorse. Where do you stand on this? As a manufacturer, in your industry how much creativity do you want to see in your workforce and how would it help you to deliver your agenda?
Mike Wilson
Creativity is very important, particularly when you are looking at the application of automation, because you need people to come up with the right solutions and new ideas about how to apply this kind of technology. Therefore, creativity needs to be very much part of the agenda. In terms of exciting and stimulating schoolchildren, I do not know whether you have come across the Lego robot schools competition. A sizeable number of schools are involved and young children are getting very excited about technology, and it brings in creativity at the same time. The challenge we face is not so much that that is not successful but what happens after that, because it drops off and there is not a next stage in the education process to continue that excitement and maintain the interest of those children in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. We need to look at further education, in the universities and technical colleges, as to how we encourage the children who got excited about Lego robots to move into engineering and continue their creativity and education in that role.
Chair
We could talk about this all day, but I have to move to Committee members.
Graham Stringer
Does the robotics and AI sector have difficulty accessing investment finance?
Mike Wilson
I am not sure I can answer that because it is a little outside my area of expertise, but my conversation with banks at present is that they have lots of money they are willing to lend people. If people have the right business case, there is a reasonable chance that the investment would be there.
Graham Stringer
That closes down a whole line of questions. We have heard different views about regulations across robotics and AI. Some people think there should be very light regulation; some believe more regulation will help investment because it will give security. What aspects of robotics and AI might benefit from regulation?
Mike Wilson
From a manufacturing perspective, the normal standards have to be applied in terms of the use of robots and automation. A new generation of collaborative robots is coming through now and there is a certain amount of confusion about how they can be applied, and what is considered safe to be used. That will continue. The pace of development continues, and the standards and the legal frameworks around them are not keeping up with the development of the technology. That certainly needs to be addressed to ensure that people have a clear picture of where the standards are going to be.
Graham Stringer
Does that mean you think the regulatory framework should be product by product rather than across the industry?
Mike Wilson
Not product by product, but possibly technology by technology, because there are different issues depending on specific things within certain technologies.
Graham Stringer
Who is developing the regulations, and who should develop them?
Dave Coplin
I think you have to do it in combination with a number of different parties. We have to do it with people like yourselves; we have to work with a number of NGOs, in particular the privacy groups. You ask about where we need some regulation. If AI is going to work successfully for us as a society, we need some intelligent privacy and we need to figure out how to do that. We need to hold the people who write the algorithms accountable for them, so how do we make that happen? We also need to make sure that we are able to minimise the biases that will be imbued in the algorithms. In AI every time an algorithm is written, embedded within it will be all the biases that exist in the humans who created it. How do we spot that? How do we become a diverse society to prevent that? These kinds of conversations will help us resolve it. It is for the tech industry, the Government, NGOs and the people who will ultimately consume the services. We have to find a way of convening those four parties together to drive forward that conversation.
Jim Dowd
My question is principally for Mr Coplin. Is it right that your title is chief envisioning officer?
Dave Coplin
It is, sir. I am immensely proud of that title. I created it myself.
Jim Dowd
I can understand you would need to be. Are there any junior envisioning officers? How many do you have?
Dave Coplin
I hope so. I am raising a 10 year-old one right now.
Jim Dowd
What is one?
Dave Coplin
The reason I created that position is that I was fed up with my industry talking about the technology and ignoring the human beings who use it, so I created a position inside my organisation that works more broadly across societies to think about and have a conversation about what we want human beings to be able to do in the future. If we know what we want humans to do, we can be a lot more mindful about the kind of technology and policy they will require to support that. I figured that, if I had a job that was essentially about the future of humanity, I deserved a job title that had a certain degree of pomposity about it, hence the choice of job title.
Jim Dowd
There is no lack of scope.
Dave Coplin
Absolutely.
Jim Dowd
Can I come to Microsoft’s experience with Tay? What was the point of it?
Dave Coplin
The point was twofold. There was a technological side. Could we create a technology—an AI bot—that would be able to converse with a human being? The second part of the experiment was a social one. What would a society do with a bot that you could converse with? Unfortunately, to our regret, we learned exactly what a specific society could do with a bot you could talk to. You could fool it into saying the most terrible, awful things that Microsoft in a million years would never want to be associated with. We see the sad thing about that example if we look at the application of a similar technology in a different society. We have another chatbot very similar to Tay called Xiaoice in operation in China. It has had over 40 million conversations with Chinese teenagers about celebrities and gossip, and not once has it been bullied into doing things we did not want to do. The lesson for us with Tay was, first, what can we do with the technology, and, secondly, what are the implications for a society of this kind of technology? Look at one of the great areas of disruption that is about to come. The call centre industry is going to be transformed by the prevalence of artificial agents. As a customer of one of those call centres, do I need to know that I am not talking to a human being? It is an open question. These are the things we are going to be challenged with, and Tay was one example of flushing out some of those issues.
Jim Dowd
You said it was a social experiment. It was not a commercial activity.
Dave Coplin
No, not at all.
Jim Dowd
You just thought it was something that would be worth doing.
Dave Coplin
The regret we as a company have about it is that we should have had the foresight that people would want to be naughty with it, and we didn’t. We were a bit too naive about it, so we deeply regret what happened.
Jim Dowd
It only lasted 16 hours, didn’t it?
Dave Coplin
Yes. Absolutely, and how terrible is that—that the first thing we would want to do is to game the system? As a pure technologist, I am slightly depressed by humanity.
Jim Dowd
Aren’t we all?
Dave Coplin
Yes.
Jim Dowd
A large part of the problem with it, allegedly, was the “repeat after me” function. Was that inbuilt or acquired?
Dave Coplin
It is a blend of both things. The way artificial intelligence works is that it learns based on repetition. In the previous session we talked about how big the corpus is—the sample of data used to train the data. All that was happening was that people were training Tay to say the wrong things, in the same way as a teenager might train their kid brother to say the wrong words at a dinner table. Tay was kind of doing what it was supposed to, but we did not build in the controls to say, “Do you know what? There are some things you don’t say, not even at the dinner table.”
Jim Dowd
Microsoft employs some of the smartest people in the world. It didn’t become one of the biggest global corporations without them. Did none of them spot that that would be likely to happen with the kind of people who inhabit cyberspace?
Dave Coplin
On one level it is a great question. On another level, you have to understand that, if you are a computer scientist creating the ability for a machine to be able to converse with another human being, you are naively wrapped up in the amazing technological progress and potential of what you have created. You don’t for a minute think that there are people out there who want to pervert it and turn it into something destructive.
Jim Dowd
Don’t you?
Dave Coplin
Not if you are a good computer scientist. Remember, this is a research project rather than a commercial one. We are creating it to create the aspiration to see what will happen in a society. We put it out there to see what happens. Therefore, it would not go through the same rigour as a product because it is a research project; it is asking questions.
Jim Dowd
Is what you have just described what is meant by the “critical oversight” mentioned in the explanation by the company?
Dave Coplin
Absolutely. With all these projects, we sometimes need to take a step back. We are the technologists. Just because we can do something does not necessarily mean we should. If I had my time again with Tay, I would do exactly the same thing, except that I would build in some filters to prevent it from saying certain things. You could still get it to appear foolish and say stupid things, but not the hurtful, terrible things it said.
Jim Dowd
Are there any broader lessons? Is it your intention to bring this back at some stage?
Dave Coplin
Absolutely.
Jim Dowd
Therefore, there are lessons you have learned.
Dave Coplin
Absolutely.
Jim Dowd
What is the point of bringing it back?
Dave Coplin
The point of bringing it back is that we believe as a company that many of the conversations we will have in the future will be had by artificial agents. We have a principle called conversations as platform, which enables the system—technology—to do things on your behalf. To take a trivial example, if today you want to book a holiday yourself you have to search on destinations, airlines, hotels and what you are going to do when you get there. In a world of agents, we know who you are and we know the things you like to do. Give us the destination and on your behalf we will negotiate things you might like to do and give you a human outcome. That is where we think the future is going. That is why we need bots, artificial agents, that can converse with human beings, that cannot be tripped up and that deliver value to the individuals we are looking out for. We think this progression is fundamental to where we are going. The lessons we learned from Tay are fundamental to enable us to do the right things in the future.
Jim Dowd
But this is all processing, not understanding.
Dave Coplin
Absolutely. For me, even the term “artificial intelligence” is bogus at this point. There is no intelligence; it is simply processing against an established pattern.
Chair
Victoria, will you process a new pattern?
Victoria Borwick
It is very interesting. Listening to you, I am interested in how we are going to drive forward what we are doing in the UK. Do we have a lower level of automation than most of our industrial competitors? What is holding back automation in the UK?
Mike Wilson
We certainly have a lower level of automation than most of our industrial competitors, and that has been demonstrated by industry statistics. There are probably a number of reasons behind that, but one of the fundamental ones is lack of awareness within general manufacturing. The automotive industry knows what it is doing and what its competitors are doing. If we step outside automotive, a lot of manufacturing businesses are not aware of how far behind they are. They are fearful of taking on the technology; they fear that they lack the skills and they think it is too expensive. We need to provide that awareness and education to ensure that our manufacturing sector at least questions whether it should be using automation rather than employing people to do those jobs. In parallel, we need to put something in place to prime the skills channel, as it were, and make sure that we have engineers coming out of colleges with the skills to implement those kinds of systems. At the moment, we really struggle.
Victoria Borwick
My personal view is that we do not start teaching those sorts of subjects early enough, but that is a slightly different question from what we are asking today. You state in your written evidence that the solution is automation, so what is your vision of how we would make that a reality?
Mike Wilson
In terms of manufacturing, most of the technology is available today. It is not about developing new things and new approaches to solving problems; it is about utilising existing technology. Some of the initiatives, such as the Manufacturing Technology Centre and what they are doing, are helpful because they provide access to businesses, but generally I find that SMEs do not approach the MTC; they think it is for big companies rather than for smaller businesses.
Victoria Borwick
Do you think that is because of the initial cost?
Mike Wilson
It is partly the initial cost and partly a perception. Because it is a very impressive building with a lot of expensive equipment in it, they feel it is not appropriate for them and they think it will be expensive. The first step is principally about awareness, and Government and politicians can potentially help by highlighting the companies in their constituencies, in their areas, that have used automation and been successful, and use that as a vehicle to encourage other manufacturing businesses to look at that kind of technology.
Victoria Borwick
You also commented that the Robotics and Autonomous Systems special interest group has had little impact on driving forward this agenda. Do you want to make any comment as to how we could improve that?
Mike Wilson
From a manufacturing perspective, it did not and does not have any particular representation from manufacturing and it is driven largely by academic interests looking at the more advanced robotic technologies.
Victoria Borwick
Do you think there should be practical users, or end users, on the group as well?
Mike Wilson
Exactly. It needs a significant manufacturing and industrial robotics content.
Victoria Borwick
Do you mean an industrial manufacturing user or somebody who manufactures the robotics?
Mike Wilson
Manufacturing industry, but also some of the automation suppliers, because they can add value to those conversations as well. They know what is available and what is being done elsewhere in the world.
Victoria Borwick
I wanted to make sure I understood, because there are obviously those who make the robotics and those who use them, and they are not necessarily the same.
Mike Wilson
It needs to be both: those who use it and have had good experience, and those who supply it.
Victoria Borwick
That is helpful. A year ago the Government agreed to establish the RAS leadership council, but we have heard that the idea has since been dropped. Do you have a view about that council? Is it necessary or unnecessary, or what do you think would be better?
Mike Wilson
It is appropriate to undertake that activity because we need leadership, but to go back to what I said about the strategy, a significant element of that needs to be focused on manufacturing, not just on the advanced robotics technologies. If it is to be put forward—I think it is worth doing—maybe it needs to be framed in a slightly different way.
Chair
Dave Coplin, what kind of leadership do you think we need in this area?
Dave Coplin
Stewardship is the kind of leadership we need in this area. We need help in opening some doors. The real challenge faced by Government is that we need to show people the potential of what all this technology enables, and I do not think we do enough of that. We need to say what is on the table. We then need to create a world that is frictionless, or as friction-free as possible, where people can embrace that technology and create new businesses and opportunities around it, but we need a safety net from you to help us with things like accountability for the algorithms, privacy and the issue around bias, so that people can be held to account in how we build those tools. There is a very delicate balance to be struck, but it has to start with something that is encouraging. I believe as an individual and we believe as an organisation that artificial intelligence in particular is probably the most important technology on the planet that anybody is working on today, not just us at Microsoft, but Google, Facebook and everybody. We need to create a world that understands it, can embrace it and get the most out of it while minimising the risks it brings to our society. That is where we need the help. In that sense, true governance is to create the opportunity for that and help us to minimise the risks.
Chris Green
Mr Wilson, how do we make sure that an autonomous system is safe, and that unwanted behaviours do not emerge as it operates in the real world?
Mike Wilson
The technology being employed today is not autonomous, in that it is not making its own decisions. It is outside my area, but in things like nuclear plants and so on there is a significant level of automation, and fail-safe mechanisms are built into that. From a manufacturing perspective, all robots are programmed and controlled by people, and the systems are set up to ensure they are safe to operate with and, provided people adhere to the safety standards being applied, everything is fine.
Chris Green
There are fail-safe systems within incredibly sensitive industries such as the nuclear industry, but if we look at autonomous cars, there is a completely different scenario. You always have the risk versus safety idea, but with autonomous cars you might have the safety versus speed idea. The stats from the car will not be just how fast you can go from nought to 60 but how fast you can manoeuvre round the city of London and get from A to B. Can you get there faster in one make rather than another? That may lead to some manufacturers optimising speed at the cost of risk. Large organisations might be quite protective of their software, algorithms and everything else. We have seen with what happened with Volkswagen and diesel that they can get up to some mischief. There are all kinds of problems as to what may happen when autonomous vehicles are unleashed, so who should be responsible for the verification and validation of controls?
Mike Wilson
Driverless cars are outside my area of expertise, but it is important that appropriate regulations and bodies are put in place to ensure that in the use of autonomous vehicles and automation, where it interacts with the general public in that way, every step is taken to make sure that it is safe and the risk is negligible.
Dave Coplin
All these technologies, not just autonomous vehicles or robotics but artificial intelligence, will bring with them some significant ethical challenges to our society. That is where we really need some help. We have seen this movie many times before. I used to work for Bing, which is Microsoft’s search engine. For me, search is one of the big areas where we have seen machine learning in particular come into our society and present challenges. I give you one that we had a few years ago. You are familiar with the auto-complete function of search engines. As you are typing in your query, the search engine does some maths and says, “Based on the characters you have just typed in and the billions of other queries that have also been typed in today, the statistical probability of your completing a sentence like this is 99%, so I will suggest that as the next option.” A few years ago we were presented with a moral dilemma by people typing in, “How do I commit suicide painlessly?” As a search engine, morally what do we do with that question? How do we answer it? Do we serve the answer, or not? It is not illegal to answer that question, but is it problematic? Yes, it is. We have to have a conversation as a society about what we want that answer to be. We have seen it more recently, in the context of terrorism, with the question, “How do I join ISIS?” Is it wrong that I should type that in? Is it wrong to answer it? I do not know; I cannot answer that from a technology company perspective.
Chris Green
Facebook has been challenged with that. Certain groups that you would not like to encourage have been closed down, but others have not.
Dave Coplin
Exactly. This is where we need to come together. These are the questions that the technology will bring to us. The classic theoretical example with autonomous vehicles is the no-win scenario. If I have to crash into one of two groups of human beings, how does the algorithm decide? These are the really difficult legal, ethical and moral discussions we have to start thinking about? We move away from the “us versus them” mentality. What do we do with that? It brings us back to speed versus safety. The Government will have to set a baseline of law that says these are the things that are legal for you to do.
Chris Green
Should it be just Government? In your book “The Rise of the Humans” one quote that might resonate quite a lot at the moment is “take back control of the potential that technology offers our society.” What kind of involvement should people have more widely?
Dave Coplin
I firmly believe that the conversation needs to be with Government, the tech industry, NGOs, where relevant, and the people we care about most, namely those we are trying to deliver services to, but the challenge we have—again, I come back to this—is that the starting point has to be a naively optimistic view: “Let me tell you about the great things that are going to happen, it’s going to be unicorns and rainbows.” Understand that it is naive, but that is what is on the table. When we understand that, then and only then, can we work backwards and say, “How do we manage the risk of this being used badly?” If we do not do that, I worry that we end up in a downward spiral of, “Oh, you can’t trust technology; you can’t use it,” and the end state of that game is that we turn off the technology. As a technologist, that is game over for me—we have missed the point—so we have to start from a different perspective.
Chris Green
We need more people envisioning for the future.
Dave Coplin
I think so. My point is not that you need more people with ponytails and beards, but that you need to inspire lots of people to think very differently. For me, it is about creativity. We should not be having a conversation with kids about robotics and AI but about what they can make with it, what they could do with it. When you do that and you see their lights go on, they do not care whether they are using robots or AI; they want to engage with it. If we can do that, we create a positive influence and a positive aspiration about how we can lift humanity further.
Chair
Mr Coplin, I would like to reassure you that we make no judgment of the fashion choices of any of our witnesses. I would like to take you back to some of your comments about ethics. Obviously, this is a central strand in the questions we are asking our witnesses. You raised the scenario of the driverless car that has to make a decision in a no‑win situation, but surely a human driver in the same situation would have to make the same decision. The only difference is that it is perfectly clear who is responsible, and there are not questions about whether the system has in some way malfunctioned. It is a question of responsibility rather than a question of decision making alone. It is not clear to me at this point whether the proposal is that tracing responsibility should go back to the programmer or to the person in charge of the AI, and if the skills level of the person in charge is not high enough to understand the programme they are using, how that responsibility could be given to the person in charge of the robot, driverless car, search engine or whatever other system they were using to make an impossible decision.
Dave Coplin
There are some fundamental building blocks that will help us with that problem. They will not themselves ultimately solve it, but they will give us the tools to be able to solve it. The building blocks are things like the way in which we create the algorithms. They must be transparent. I must be able to see the pattern or rules that have been used to create the outcome. As a human I need to be able to inspect that, as much as the algorithms need to understand what the humans may choose to do with that information. We need a level of accountability for the algorithms. The people making the algorithm and the AI need to be held accountable for the outcome. We also need to do lots of work around bias. Bias is really important. A relatively new level of understanding for us in the world of AI is how we as humans imbue human bias in artificial intelligence. If you will humour me, I will give a trivial example—something that occurred to me while I was in Canada a few weeks ago. If you were to ask somebody to write an algorithm to make tea, you should give real thought as to who you are asking to do it. If you asked a British person to write that algorithm, there would be a warm pot, tea bags would be scalded by boiling water, the pot would be left to stew for a few minutes and then the tea would be poured into a warm cup. If you asked a North American to write the algorithm for making tea, there would be a cup of lukewarm water with the tea bag and milk already in it, and it would be served up. Both of those are valid cups of tea. [Interruption.] I share your view, but as a consumer of that cup of tea, being transparent about who wrote the algorithm is really important to you, because it affects the outcome. If you will forgive that really trivial example—
Chair
I fear you have spoken controversial words.
Dave Coplin
It shows you that we now have to be mindful of the philosophies, morals and ethics of the organisations that are creating the algorithms that increasingly we rely on every day. That is where this conversation needs to go. We have to look into that and establish those things. As a company, we know that the answer to many of these problems lies in things like diversity and the right kind of internal regulation and processes, so that we do not end up in a situation where we have unintended consequences, or, if we do, it is transparent enough that we can look back to see where the problems occurred. This is the learning we must have as a technology industry working with you in Government and with policy makers and the public at large as to the outcome of these things.
Chair
In order for that sort of accountability and transparency to be effective, the verification and validation systems would have to be able to respond to active learning systems, and the people who are analysing those validation and verification systems would need to be able to understand the outputs of those systems. We have discussed how far advanced we are with AI and robotics. How far advanced are we with the verification and validation systems? We have not had positive comments so far on this particular area of research. Where is Microsoft on this?
Dave Coplin
It is not an area I am that familiar with in terms of the specifics.
Chair
You have given us the trivial example of biased tea-making, but bias in AI weapons systems might not have such a trivial outcome. Are there any areas of AI or robotics that you think should be off-limits?
Dave Coplin
That is a wonderfully moral question. There are some baselines. We should not be doing anything that is illegal. As a society, we have a duty of care to consider the implications of how the technology might be used to destroy life rather than to give life. My frustration with where we are with this conversation, not in this room but more broadly as a society, is that I think this technology will help our society with some of the greatest challenges it faces, from diseases like cancer right through to how we feed poorer nations. The technology will help us with all those things, and that is where we should be putting all the focus, rather than on the things that will destroy life or take life away. We need regulation to prevent that, as with any powerful technology. I do not see this as being any different.
Chair
Mike Wilson, before we close the session do you have any key points on the direction we are going in with ethics and the frameworks we need to put in place in the light of the comments we have just heard?
Mike Wilson
I agree with Dave’s comments. I should stress that we are probably a long way from the reality of these kinds of technologies getting to that point, but we should be thinking about it now so that we have had the thought process before we get to that point.
Chair
I thank both of you. It has been an extremely thought-provoking session and extremely helpful for us in developing our thinking for our report. We may well have questions to follow up with, and I hope you will be kind and write back to us. Thank you very much. Oral evidence: Robotics and artificial intelligence, HC 145 12 [1] The witness later clarified that the precise figure depends upon exactly where you draw the boundaries of what constitutes a “RAS” project, but it is in this range. [2] The witness later clarified that “We did invest £15,000, but then made a second investment of £50,000, making £65,000 in total.”