Select committee calls for bill to address AI threat to human rights

The UK's Joint Committee on Human Rights has done the thing committees do: it has published a report, which per the BBC calls for a new bill on AI to 'address the scale and seriousness' of threats to human rights. Which is to say, one document has been emitted recommending that a second, better document be emitted later by people who have not yet been identified. 'Scale and seriousness' is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because there is no enforcement mechanism in it, no number, and no deadline.

Give the committee this much: chair Alex Sobel MP is admirably plain about it. 'Nowhere in the world, including the UK, has a current legislative and regulatory approach to AI that is fit for purpose.' That is a sitting MP conceding, on the record, that his own country's rulebook fails the test, and that nobody else's passes either. Over in Washington, Speaker Mike Johnson told Axios that Congress would not be taking the lead, which now reads less like abdication than like the only straight answer anyone has given on the subject.

So the machinery grinds on. A committee of parliamentarians has established that regulation is inadequate, and has responded by recommending regulation — addressed to a government that, in the excerpt at least, has said nothing back. Somewhere, a minister will read 'scale and seriousness', nod gravely, and promise a consultation on a framework of principles by a date to be announced. Meanwhile the threats will carry on scaling and being serious, entirely unbothered by anybody's good intentions. Mr Sobel has said the true thing out loud, and the British constitutional response to the true thing is to note it in a report and move on to the next item on the order paper.