The Archbishop of Canterbury:...Joshua Watson and his friends
conceived their plans at a time of great national crisis and
upheaval. The Luddite movement, which also began in 1811, was a
response to fear of redundancy because of growing technological
advances. Two centuries later, the advances that threaten
long-established patterns of work are different—but they are still
there, in what we are now calling the fourth industrial revolution.
As the World Economic Forum describes it, the...Request free trial
The :...Joshua
Watson and his friends conceived their plans at a time of great
national crisis and upheaval. The Luddite movement, which also
began in 1811, was a response to fear of redundancy because of
growing technological advances. Two centuries later, the advances
that threaten long-established patterns of work are different—but
they are still there, in what we are now calling the fourth
industrial revolution. As the World Economic Forum describes it,
the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of
the last century is today accompanied by emerging technological
breakthroughs in fields such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics, the internet
of things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology,
biotechnology, materials science, energy storage and quantum
computing. How our schools and our further and higher education
institutions can equip us for this seismic shift, and how our
systems of social security and support can enable us to keep our
society cohesive and healthy, are among the greatest challenges
facing this generation, and the generation to come. And, of course,
there is Brexit, with unforeseeable changes, challenges and
opportunities...
(Con):...It affects not only unskilled jobs: middle
management will be decimated by it. When RBS says it is to close
279 banks, it is not bank clerks who will lose their jobs; it is
all middle managers—people who have taken humanities degrees and
have a job in a big company, expecting to live the rest of their
lives very comfortably. Artificial Intelligence and big data
will largely destroy those jobs...
The Lord :...I speak
this afternoon from three perspectives: as the bishop of a diocese
with more than 280 church schools, both primary and secondary, and
that number is rising; as a member of your Lordships’ Select
Committee on Artificial Intelligence, which has been a
fascinating enterprise; and as a grandfather with three, as yet
unsuspecting, grandsons who will enter the education system in the
next year or so. The eldest is two and a half and the youngest is
just three months. Those grandsons will grow up in a different
world. They will probably never drive or own cars; they will
interact with screens and machines from an early age, something
which is already happening; they will need to know how to set
boundaries around their online lives; and their working life and
their leisure will be more different from mine than my own is from
my grandfather’s...
...In the recent Budget, the Government indicated that major
investment in the teaching of digital skills and computer science
will be forthcoming. It is very considerable: £406 million for
maths and technical education; £84 million to train 8,000 computer
science teachers, trebling their number by the end of this
Parliament; and a new centre for computing education. The
Government’s new industrial strategy identifies four grand
challenges, of which the first is to put the UK at the forefront
of Artificial Intelligence and the data
revolution. Education and skills are vital in meeting this goal.
But this digital education must be set clearly in the context of
ethics and values, and the ethics and values we are commending
today must be at the heart of our digital education. The scope of
PSHE must include the digital challenges children and young people
are facing: how to set boundaries to preserve your identity; how to
recognise signs of addiction; how to behave with wisdom in a
digital world, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fall, reminded us; how
to build human relationships alongside followers; and how to
develop the inner force to counter, as the noble Lords, and , said, the very dark side
of the digital world...
(Lab):..The
second is technology. Increasingly, our lives are dominated by
technology. That is happening more and more
with Artificial Intelligence, on which my noble
friend has been doing some
excellent work, robotics and computers. Technology is in danger of
replacing reflective human reason by reducing it to a pure
technique...
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