Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to have been invited to come and speak this evening. It would seem that the APP is a small but select assembly- you have accountants, management consultants, tax advisors, bankers and, yes, even lawyers. I hate to break it to you but if you added estate agents, car dealers and politicians to the list you would really be able to claim the title of “most unpopular organisation. Ever.”
Partnerships are part of the life blood of our economy, being used in so many walks of life. An understanding of partnership law, its evolution, and how innovative and different types of business association can be best for businesses, is an extremely useful attribute. The creation and operation of entities that operate under the law as part of a free enterprise economy is vital for our future. As facilitators of lawful activity , then members of this association play an important part in maintaining the high standards that must apply if the UK is to remain a world economy and a safe place in which to invest.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that some of our favourite stories from history are, in fact, myths. King Harold and his arrow in the eye, for instance. Nelson saying before he died “kiss me Hardy”, George V on his deathbed, asking “how is the Empire”, and Sir Isaac Newton, being tonked on the head by an apple as he sat under that tree. Charming, all of it, but rubbish. You can blame Voltaire for the Newton story. You can blame Voltaire for a lot of things, it has to be said. Even his most readily quoted phrase “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the Death your right to say it.” Is in fact the creation of a later biographer.
The same is true for the often quoted maxim “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Far more likely to be a paraphrasing of Edmund Burke, rather than a direct quotation, it remains in the public consciousness due to its timeless nature. The sentiment it expressed was as true in 18th century Britain as it is in 21st century Ukraine.
On a day that began with the resignation of the two serving UK Judges, Lords Reed and Hodge, from the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, we have received a stark reminder of the direct threat to democracy and the rule of law posed by regimes that either openly reject them or seek to impose and extend the ambit of their particular brand of “democracy”, which is nothing of the kind. This is what we face with China and Putin’s Russian regime as it spreads death and chaos in Ukraine. If anyone had any doubts about the direct threat to the international rules-based order, then they should now be completely disabused of them.
The situation in Ukraine may be the most glaring threat to the international rule of law, but it is far from the only one we currently face. From a Russian perspective, it is the culmination of democratic and legal backsliding that has been taking place for well over a decade. In Beijing, President Xi, Mr Putin’s most prominent enabler has rolled back Hong Kong’s freedoms, completely disregarding the Sino-British Joint Declaration as well as committing a heinous crimes against millions of Uighurs.
In democracies too, fervent nationalism threatens to engulf political decision making. With choices being taken not because they are morally correct or in accordance with international legal norms, but because they are politically expedient.
This problem strikes at the heart of the challenges we currently face in public life. Both in the United Kingdom and across the Western World. Ministers and Politicians, just like leading figures of business are given the task of making the organisations they lead run more effectively and deliver for consumers, or in ministers’ case, the general public. They are also called to take decisions in the best interest of those institutions and the people they serve. Even if those decisions run against what is best for their own career.
This is especially true in our own political system, as we are directly accountable to our constituents. This personal constituency link is one of the strongest components of modern Parliamentary democracy. The hardworking MP, and, believe me, most MPs do work very hard, will be able to turn from international affairs to a local development issue without drawing breath. As Tip O’Neill, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives famously put it: “all politics are local”. I firmly believe in service, and public service too. The best form of leadership is embodied by service, enlivened by imagination and empathy too. Servant leadership is the most difficult kind of leadership. Difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. Many if not all of you in this room will know what I mean. The ability to inspire people out of respect, not fear, is the best form of leadership in my view.
Having had the privilege of being responsible for the Ministry of Justice during two of the most challenging years of its existence, I can tell you what responsibility truly means. Not power, but responsibility, for a department of over 80,000 staff with an annual revenue budget of over £8b and some of the biggest projects in Government, from probation reform to prison-building. Enough to keep anyone awake at night in normal times, but when Covid struck, we were in uncharted waters. The first priority was to keep the system going, literally. In prisons, we acted to contain the spread of the virus by quarantining new entrants, shielding the vulnerable and keeping symptomatic prisoners separate too. I want to pay tribute to the dedicated prison officers, governors and other staff who kept going at the height of difficult lockdowns and who kept deaths down to below 200, avoided disorder and unrest and kept prisons and prisoners safe. An incredible story of their achievement.
In our courts too, faced with the challenge of social distancing, we kept the system moving. We moved from 500 or so cases a week being dealt with remotely to over 20k cases every week. Although two months were lost when jury trials were suspended, we were the first major jurisdiction in the world to re-start them, and whilst there is a backlog, in many parts of the jurisdiction, cases are getting through the system. The challenge is particularly acute in London and the South East, but after years of retrenchment, the court maintenance budget was increased significantly and more sitting days were allocated in order to help deal with the challenge. And all this as we moved to a national Probation Service, reformed the law of sentencing and introduced landmark divorce law reform. Two years of dramatic change.
One of the main lessons we should have learned from the Covid crisis is that it is technology that provides us with new opportunities to enhance productivity. Artificial intelligence being one of the most exciting but also perhaps, one of the most misunderstood. Broadly defined as ‘intelligent systems with the ability to think and learn.’ Public discourse around them tends to rapidly descend into science fiction or fears of large swathes of the working population being made effectively obsolete. Such concerns are of course not new, John Maynard Keynes warned in the 1930s of “technological unemployment” that would result in increased automation. Indeed, Marvin Minsky, the Founder of MIT’s AI lab made an ominous prediction that with “3 to 8 years we will have a machine with the general intelligence and an average human being […] able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke and have a fight.” The computer would then according to Mr Minsky “Begin to educate itself (and) in a few months […] be at genius level.”
We may still be a few years off such a dystopian level of technical advancement. But AI is now doing things that once seemed, ‘to be in the realm of fantasy.’ Indeed a 2016 study into the cancer detection illustrates possibilities opened by technological advancement particularly poignantly. The researchers found that using solely AI to detect cancer in images of Lymph node cells had an error rate of 7.5% compared to a trade of 3.5% if the same test was done by pathologists. Combining the two however, led to an error rate of just 0.5%.
As this example shows, in the majority of causes if used effectively AI doesn’t need to replace human beings but enhance their productivity. AI is ideally suited to analytical decision making and able to process vast amount of information far beyond human beings, but as Bernie Meyerson IBM’s chief innovation officer said in 2017 “humans bring common sense to the work; by its definition, common sense is not a fact-based undertaking. It’s a judgement call.” AI if used in a considered and ethical fashion is a means of augmenting employees work rather than simply replacing it.
We are already seeing the benefits of this in the UK, in recent years Deloitte has developed a tool that offers ‘monitoring and sensing of an organisations external environment enabling semi-automated strategy articulation.’
In the security world, facial recognition technology, emergency sensors and high definition body cameras, are helping tackle everything from anti social behaviour in supermarkets, to providing valuable irrefutable evidence for emergency services.
However, as we enter this new world where governments and corporations have access to huge amounts of personal data and information, questions surrounding the ethics of these new technologies are being asked more regularly. After all, they have the potential to be extremely invasive, fostering mistrust and providing ammunition to those who see such advances as the manifestation of some Orwellian nightmare rather than the opportunity to create a more secure, prosperous and productive society.
In the coming years, it will be up to the legal sector in partnership with government, to address the ethical dilemmas created by the proliferation of technology across our society. Creating a system that ensures technology remains our subject and not our master.
It is my belief, that the UK has the potential to play a key role as a global broker in establishing international legal norms for governments and corporations using AI. The challenge will considerable, one need only look at China’s orchestrated surveillance of its people, to see the dreadful alternative to an ethically regulated system. But people across the world do not clamour for repression and control, their desire is to live in a country where they are free to disagree with what of what one another says, but will forever defend their right to say it. Now who said that again?
