EVENT
Lords AI Committee Testimony (December 2017)
Edgerton's December 2017 testimony before the UK House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence — where he characterized AI hype as
ahistorical, crude nonsense and read aloud from Harold Wilson's 1963 speech to demonstrate that the language of technological transformation has not changed in half a century.
In December 2017, the UK
House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence convened a series of expert witnesses to inform what would become the committee's 2018 report
AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able?. Among the witnesses was
David Edgerton, who delivered the most caustic and historically grounded critique the committee received. He characterized the rhetoric of the fourth industrial revolution as "reheated rhetoric from years ago," read aloud from Harold Wilson's 1963 speech about the "white heat of the technological revolution" to demonstrate that the language could be transposed unchanged to the present, and concluded that hyping artificial intelligence was "ahistorical, crude nonsense." The committee published its report. The framework Edgerton challenged remained intact. The asymmetry
between his historical analysis and the policy outcome became, in retrospect, a case study in the dynamic he had spent his career documenting.