AI weapons, the future of food production, and tackling homelessness

Hello, I'm Robert Lisvane, Lord Lisvane.

I'm chair of the Special Inquiry Committee into Artificial Intelligence and Weapons Systems.

And the committee is one of four set up by the House.

As a one-year inquiry, we have to report by the end of November.

Lord Lisvane, you're currently chairing the new committee looking into the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems.

First of all, could you tell us a little bit about your background?

I spent my career in the House of Commons service and I finished as clerk of the house.

I retired in 2014 and so I've been in this house for very nearly 10 years.

I'm a crossbencher after a career spent being rigidly politically impartial.

I certainly couldn't be anything else and I have lots of other occupations and interests, but I spent a lot of time in the House.

I suppose it's quite helpful because in my professional career down the other end, I should think I was involved in something like a couple of hundred select committee inquiries.

So I've seen select committees in lots of different modes and lots of different subjects.

How did you find that sort of transition from being a member of staff in the House of Commons to then being a member of the Lords?

It was fascinating.

Very, very different.

And I think one of the really important things about the relationship between the two houses is that it's not competing.

It's complementary.

And very often you find people who say, oh, the Lords does this or the House of Commons does that.

But the thing is that the two houses do recognisably similar things, but they do them in different ways.

So the complementarity, as it were, of parliamentary activity is something which is really important in providing an effective counterweight to the overmighty executive.

And executives are always overmighty.

So I think that's probably something I noticed immediately in terms of the atmosphere in the House.

It's very thoughtful and reflective, which you can never say really about the House of Commons.

And it is... extremely courteous and the fact that so many members of the House have expertise or experience, I usually use the word experience because expertise takes a lot of effort to keep up to date, that fact means that ministers I think get a rougher ride and there's more time for the government to be called to account and ministers to be examined than there is in the rather more helter-skelter proceedings in the House of Commons.

And one area in particular the committee will be considering is autonomous weapon systems, so systems that can select and attack a target without human intervention.