CW@60: Living with the digital revolution

Life chances

I joined the Liberal Party in 1973 because it espoused a society where no one is enslaved by poverty, ignorance, or conformity. In those early decades of the digital revolution, I saw technology as an important expander of life chances. The internet, in particular, felt like the great democratiser - a force that could level the playing field between the powerful and the powerless.

My professional contact with the edge of technological disruption came as head of legal services at London Weekend Television between 1980 and 1983. I wrote about the emerging legal wild west of cable and satellite television long before the internet arrived. We were wrestling then with transnational signal relays, copyright protection, and the harmonisation of European standards. When Napster arrived at the turn of the century, followed by file-sharing, iTunes, and eventually Spotify, I recognised the pattern immediately.

The case for UK sovereign technological capability has deeper roots than the recent debate over US tech dominance might suggest. With the backing of advisors such as myself, Paddy Ashdown - in his early days as an MP, before becoming the first Liberal Democrat leader after the merger of the Liberal Party with the SDP - challenged the way American extraterritorial reach under the Export Administration Act was compelling British firms to seek US permission before re-exporting or even relocating US-origin computer equipment, regardless of where it sat or who owned it.

Four decades on, the dynamic we identified has become even more pronounced. Reliance on US hyperscalers for cloud infrastructure, US-designed chips for AI compute, and American platforms for critical public services means the leverage Ashdown warned against is now baked in. The drive towards domestic AI capacity, open standards, and national compute infrastructure is the answer to the question he put to government then - and which deserves a clearer answer now.

And subsequently, technology would constantly and irrevocably outpace existing law. The question was never whether disruption was coming. It was whether we were ready.

Downside risks

Alongside the enormous potential, downside risks became impossible to ignore. As the historian Yuval Noah Harari has warned, the greatest danger facing liberal democracy is the concentration of data in the hands of a few. We witnessed the rise of what Shoshana Zuboff termed “surveillance capitalism” - an architecture in which citizens’ personal data is harvested and monetised, turning people into products rather than participants.

Automated decision-making and machine learning began replicating and amplifying historic human biases. When an algorithm makes opaque decisions about a person’s credit rating, healthcare access, or employment prospects, it doesn’t just fail them in that moment. It actively restricts their life chances - the very thing I had hoped technology would expand.

“Sixty years of the digital revolution have given me reasons for both hope and concern, often simultaneously. What has never wavered is my underlying conviction that technology must serve humanity, not the other way around”

Tim Clement-Jones

This realisation - that technology could become a master rather than a servant, to use the framing I later chose for my book Living with the algorithm: Servant or master?- sent me firmly on my current trajectory. It is why, in 2016, I co-founded the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence, and the following year, I was appointed to chair the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence. Our 2018 report, AI in the UK: Ready, willing and able?, laid down a principle I consider non-negotiable - the autonomous power to hurt, destroy, or deceive human beings should never be vested in artificial intelligence. That principle has not dated.

Since then, the challenges have only multiplied. We face a real fight to protect children online - one that requires genuine media literacy and risk-based age ratings, not knee-jerk blanket bans.

Human creativity

We must defend human creativity: as chair of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, representing over 130,000 members, I am currently in the thick of what I can only call the Great AI Copyright Battle. Generative AI poses a direct threat to the livelihoods of creators and the economics of the creative industries, and government consultations that risk capitulating to the tech giants are, frankly, not good enough. Transparency and opt-in licensing must be the baseline, not an aspiration.

There is also an urgent new frontier of social injustice that receives too little attention - digital exclusion. In modern Britain, digital inclusion should be as fundamental as access to water or electricity. Every day spent offline - unable to access education, employment, or healthcare services - is a day of missed opportunities. And it is also why - particularly in the face of government plans to require digital ID to access their services - I have recently been pressing for a new criminal offence of digital identity theft, recognising that the crimes of the digital age demand a legal framework fit for the digital age.

Throughout all of this, I have consistently challenged the narrative that basic safeguards hinder progress. The conventional wisdom - that regulation stifles innovation - needs turning on its head. Robust, binding legislation is not the enemy of technological advancement. It is its foundation. To be trusted, innovation requires accountability.

As I look back across 60 years of the digital revolution - from my parents’ wartime work at Bletchley Park, to my absurdly heavy Compaq, to the astonishing and sometimes alarming capabilities of today’s generative AI - the fundamental question remains the one I first asked decades ago. Will technology expand our life chances, or diminish them?

Sixty years of the digital revolution have given me reasons for both hope and concern, often simultaneously. What has never wavered is my underlying conviction that technology must serve humanity, not the other way around. Ensuring that it does is not a technical problem. It is a political one. And it is nowhere near solved.

Lord Tim Clement-Jones is the Liberal Democrat spokesperson in the House of Lords for science, innovation and technology.