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LONDON — Nobody disputes artificial intelligence is the technology of the future — which makes Rishi Sunak’s pick for AI minister in the U.K. government a little unorthodox.
Jonathan Berry, 53, is better known in Westminster as the 5th Viscount Camrose — a hereditary peer in the House of Lords whose title has been passed down the generations from father to son.
There were “no castles,” Berry jokes of his upbringing, but as a child he would visit the family’s Hackwood Park estate, then owned by his great uncle Seymour Berry (the 2nd Viscount Camrose).
The estate — a 17th-century mansion complete with 24 bedrooms, a Tudor-style banqueting hall, library, and riding stables — was sold off in the late 1990s. But the viscountcy, the fourth rank in the British peerage system — standing directly below an earl and above a baron — survives to this day.
It was that title that allowed Berry to take his seat in the House of Lords last year, one of 92 hereditary peers who continue to sit in the upper chamber of the British parliament.
Few would have guessed that less than a year later, Berry would find himself not just seated in the legislature but installed in a key government department overseeing the U.K.’s strategy on artificial intelligence, one of five “critical technologies” identified by the government and a personal priority of the prime minister.
“It was never part of the plan to become a minister,” admits Berry, speaking in his sparse, echoey office on the ground floor of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
But when the government chief whip called to offer Berry the job, he realized he just couldn’t say no. “It’s too exciting,” he beams.
Berry’s House of Lords colleagues were also taken by surprise when Sunak came calling in March.
Berry had been a member of a Lords committee looking at AI in Weapon Systems for “about an hour and a half,” a fellow peer quipped, though they said they found him charming.
“His name was news to me!” one veteran House of Lords aide said when quizzed about how the appointment of Berry, who only joined Twitter in May, was received.
Sci-fi fan
Not everyone is impressed to see a hereditary peer in such a key role.
“There is a real question over whether hereditary peers should be in the House of Lords at all, and that question becomes even more pressing when we see them being put into ministerial jobs of significant influence in government,” said Willie Sullivan, senior director of campaigns for the Electoral Reform Society.
“Ministers from the Lords do not have a democratic connection with the public and the distance is even more pronounced with hereditary peers, who have found their way into parliament, and then sometimes government, by dint of the privileged circumstances of their birth.”
“Hereditary legislators are something that belongs to the 17th century, not a modern 21st-century democracy.”
But in his four months in the job, Berry has won over some skeptics on the opposition benches who, despite finding him, as one put it, a bit “wet behind the ears” politically, say he is a serious and diligent addition to the front bench.
It was “blind luck” that Sunak created DSIT in a Whitehall shakeup just under a year after his appointment to the Lords, Berry says, and so was on the lookout for a minister to represent it in the House of Lords.
Despite Berry’s grand background — the first Viscount Camrose, his great-grandfather William Berry, was an early 20th-century newspaper magnate — it was a more prosaic career in management consultancy which appears to have attracted Sunak’s attention.
Berry worked “on the tech side,” both running his own consultancy and working in-house for big corporations including Pfizer, Dell, BP and Shell.
“The opportunity came up and one or two of the members of the House were kind enough to say, ‘Look, you should really stand for this, it’d be great to have somebody with your sort of techno background in the house,’ so I stood twice, and got it the second time,” Berry told POLITICO of his decision to try to get into the U.K.’s unelected legislative chamber.
Berry says he always chose the AI options when studying for an MBA at Pennsylvania’s Carnegie Mellon University in the late 1990s, but his interest in technologies of the future started at a younger age. He claims to have been “thinking about AI since I was about 5 years old” as an obsessive reader of science fiction.
His father Adrian Berry, the science correspondent for the Daily Telegraph from 1977 to 1997, was also a huge influence. “We talked about it a lot,” Berry says of AI.
The first non-fiction book Berry claims to have ever read about AI was his father’s 1983 “The Super Intelligent Machine,” dedicated to him and his sister Jessica.
“Some are fearful that research into artificial intelligence is so dangerous that it ought to be prohibited,” the dust jacket of the book presciently notes, predicting the 90s would see computers understanding the human voice and distinguishing one face from another.
It goes on to ask: “But might that not be the ‘death’ of one of mankind’s potentially most powerful allies?”
Utopia or dystopia
Berry’s own view on the breakneck speed of the development of AI has crystallized since taking office four months ago.
He once saw AI as “utopia or dystopia,” either amazing for humanity, or horrendous. He now thinks there will always be risks, many of them very serious, but also tremendous opportunities.
“Looking at it as a sort of crossroads with an either-or direction, I don’t think is really helpful,” he says.
He is reluctant to offer a view on when or whether artificial general intelligence, or so-called “God-like AI” which is able to accomplish any intellectual task that human beings or animals can perform, will be reached.
Instead he talks up the U.K.’s aspiration to be the home of an early warning system.
Britain should have a physical center “looking at these frontier risks, constantly scanning the horizon and understanding how close or how far that’s getting,” he says, adding there is a “strong sense of urgency” in government.
A government-backed Foundation Model Taskforce, led by tech investor Ian Hogarth, will be tasked with demonstrating how AI might be deployed in two or three “sovereign use cases,” such as “one in healthcare, one in geospatial,” to show what the possibilities are.
It would not only showcase the technology, but also “shows that the government can quickly move and use our huge built-in data advantages to produce something rapidly of real value to society,” Berry says.
“That helps us demonstrate, okay, we’re covering the risks, and we’re building towards the future possibilities.”
Get China involved
Despite a positive outlook, Berry admits that the thought of AI in weapons systems keeps him up at night.
“I think a lot of actors — be they state, or non-state — will probably get to a point where they can develop AI weapons,” he warns, though he says there are defensive measures that can be taken. “Where AI takes the conventional arms race is something that anybody thinking about AI needs to worry about.”
However, he is adamant that when it comes to AI safety, Britain and its allies can’t do it alone.
Sunak has put a global summit on AI safety, to be hosted by the U.K. later this year, at the heart of his efforts to position the U.K. as a world leader on AI safety. Whether China will be invited is being viewed as a key test of Sunak’s ambitions for the summit.
Berry says the question of China’s attendance is a matter for the Foreign Office, but he says “it would be absolutely crazy to sort of try and bifurcate AI safety regulation globally.”
“Where there’s a global movement to address risks of artificial intelligence, China will have to be involved in one way or another.”
“I can’t see why they would choose not to be,” he adds.
Ebb and flow
For Berry, AI “has long been my hobby horse,” he says. But it has come in useful in his work, too.
He says he uses AI-powered tools to write speeches (“Its jokes aren’t very funny,” he admits) and to summarize the huge amount of information he needs to absorb daily.
On that use he is more cautious, though. AI has “no idea whether they’re telling you the truth,” Berry admits. “You have to be rather careful about using that.”
Despite the drawbacks, Berry’s lifetime interest in AI has assured him the technology isn’t going anywhere.
“It always felt on the cusp of becoming amazing, and then there were these AI winters and everybody said ‘Oh it will never happen,’ and then it comes back,” he said.
AI is now firmly on the political agenda and developments are coming at breakneck speed. But the fundamental questions haven’t changed much from those Berry’s father posed 40 years ago in 1983.
