The effect of AI on the jobs market was recently addressed in PwC’s AI Jobs Barometer. The report revealed that, since 2016, growth in jobs requiring specialist AI skills had outpaced growth in all jobs and, maybe more importantly, these specialist jobs carried “up to a 25% wage premium”.

That’s the positive, but of course there is some trepidation. “We should regulate AI before it regulates us” is the epigraph that begins Lord Clement-Jones’s new book on the future policy challenges of artificial intelligence, Living with the Algorithm: Servant or Master? That quote comes from historian Yuval Noah Harari. Later comes another quote – from Stephen Hawking – that could equally have served as the book’s maxim: “Artificial intelligence will be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity.”

Lord Clement-Jones is a Liberal Democrat peer. He was Chair of the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence between 2017 and 2018 and went on to co-found and co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence. In his non-parliamentary life, he was managing partner of DLA Piper. He is still a consultant for the global law firm, specifically on AI policy and regulation, and was assisted in the writing of the book by fellow DLA Piper AI expert, Coran Darling. Lord Clement-Jones was also a member of the ICAEW Corporate Finance Faculty board until last year.

The book provides a sober, but non-apocalyptic, insight into the challenges and opportunities of the fast-developing technology. The authors consider its practical and ethical impacts in the worlds of government and work, while also looking at the role regulation will have to play.

In describing the effects of AI, figures from Greek mythology are often relied upon – Midas, Talos and Sisyphus all feature – as Lord Clement-Jones seeks to “write about AI in narrative terms”. Perhaps taking a cue from Stephen Cave at the Leverhulme Centre for Future Intelligence in Cambridge, who brings Frankenstein and the Prague Golem into his philosophical AI narratives, Lord Clement-Jones sees Greek history as more relevant: “They always thought that there was something beyond them that could threaten them. The Greeks understood this stuff, and maybe we don’t understand it enough.”

Benefits uncapped

Cautionary note aside, Lord Clement-Jones writes: “AI is not, however, despite what many headlines would lead us to believe, all doom and gloom. In reality, AI presents opportunities worldwide across a variety of sectors, such as healthcare, education, financial services, marketing, retail, agriculture, energy conservation, public services, smart or connected cities and regulatory technology itself. The predictive, analytical and problem-solving nature of AI, and in particular generative AI systems, has the potential to drastically improve performance, research outcomes, productivity and customer experience.”

The book is a serious attempt to balance the potential benefits of artificial intelligence and its challenges and risks, which “have the potential to impact the rights and safety of individuals and organisations across the world”.

Lord Clement-Jones writes: “Failure to recognise them poses a threat to the retention of public trust in AI and will undermine much of the work of innovators in demonstrating the many potential benefits of new developments in technology.”

Befitting a politician, particularly one with a legal background, Lord Clement-Jones spends much of the book thinking about regulation. He tells Corporate Financier: “We don’t live in a state of anarchy. We do live in a state where most people obey rules, and regulation can affect behaviour.”

However, the challenges are truly international. “It is one thing to assert our values and desire to be competitive. It is quite another to adopt a consistently hostile stance to cooperation with China on the safety and ethics of new technology,” he writes.

“What we’re trying to do is to instill the proper kind of behaviour without being too heavy handed about it,” he says. “It doesn’t get rid of the need for decent corporate governance and it’s going to be very, very difficult to absolutely ensure that the adopters as well as the developers get it right.” That difficulty, “the challenging and urgent task for policymakers”, is “the essence of the book”.

In the slightly narrower world of corporate finance, Lord Clement-Jones sees AI models being beneficial to due diligence and post-deal execution. But here, too, there could be unintended consequences. While AI is being ‘trained’, junior associates are not: “What’s happening is that the opportunities for training and being on the spot with your senior people are being restricted. As AI crunches the data, the associate doesn’t quite get that leg up while they are learning, because a lot of those intermediate steps in professional services may well be undertaken by AI.”

This speaks to a wider theme in the book on the impact of AI on the future of work. “A key factor here is the potential hollowing out of professional skills,” Lord Clement-Jones writes. “How are young professionals and other experts going to get the necessary experience in mid-career when it is going to be AI that does much of the work?”

Lord Clement-Jones says that he’s tried to get AI to write speeches for him, but the results are “incredibly pompous, as if I was giving the State of the Union address”. For my part, I use an AI tool to record interviews, which saves a lot of time on transcription, but needs considerable human oversight to manage multiple errors. Not the largest problem for individual magazine articles, but potentially catastrophic for hidden lines in multi-million-dollar deal sheets.

Tools of the trade

My AI tool says that in a half-hour conversation “Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 discussed the potential impact of generative AI on M&A, including benefits and challenges. They also discussed the need for regulating AI to ensure ethical use while promoting innovation, emphasising the importance of international standards, proper risk assessment, and continuous monitoring. Speaker 2 highlighted the potential consequences of AI on society and governance, including its impact on the economy, democracy, and individual privacy, while both speakers expressed concerns about the potential risks and limitations of AI, including over-reliance, hallucinations, and misinformation.”

That’s a fair summary, but, as Lord Clement-Jones admits, the book itself “has only scratched the surface”. However, he writes: “It is hoped that those who read it will build on some of the practical ideas and steps put forward.”

Identifying education and healthcare as particular sectors where AI can deliver positive outcomes, he returns to his central thesis, that “regulation is not necessarily the enemy of innovation, and the need for public trust and trustworthy AI should be reflected in how we regulate”.

“As we do go forward, however, it is worth remembering that humans have met the challenges of change effectively before,” says Lord Clement-Jones. Returning to the Greeks, he adds that “after all, it was Heraclitus, some 2,500 years ago, who observed that ‘change alone is unchanging’. Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne point the way to the appropriate response at the conclusion of Tools and Weapons: ‘Technology innovation is not going to slow down. The work to manage it needs to speed up.’ We all need to take that to heart.”