President , your excellencies, and faithful audience. It is customary for the british Prime Minister to comment to a nation to pledge to advance our values and defend our rules and preserve the twostate solution to the conflict in the middle east. But no one can ignore a Gathering Force reshaping the future of every member of this assembly. There has been nothing like it in history. When i think of the great, scientific revolutions of the past, the steam engine, aviation, the atomic age, i think of new tools that we acquire over which we, the human race, have the advantage, which we control, and that is not necessarily the case in the digital age. You may keep your secrets from your friends and your parents, your children, your doctor, even your personal trainer, but it takes real effort to conceal your thoughts from google, and if that is true today, in the future, there may be nowhere to hide, sensors all joined together by the internet of things, all of us commuting , so there is a parking space for your electric car and so the been goes to the street, and the urban environment is antiseptic. But this technology can also be used to keep every citizen under roundtheclock surveillance. A future alexa will take orders , but this alexa will be watching you and stamping her foot. In the future, voice connectivity will be in every room, and your mattress will monitor your nightmares, and your front door will sweep wide the money you approach like some silent butler. Youre smart meter will go to return the cheapest electricity, and every one of yourminutely transcribing habit in tiny electronic shorthand, stored not in their chips or anywhere you can find it but in some great cloud of louts ever more oppressively over the human race, a huge thundercloud waiting to burst, and we have no control over how or when the pursue petition will take place, and every day that week cap on our phones or work on our ipads, as i see some of you are doing leave ourt only indelible spore in the ether, but we are ourselves becoming a source, click by click and tap bite tap, just as the undescribable wealth of hydrocarbons, data is the crude oil of the modern economy. We are now in an environment where he do not know who owns these new oilfields or who has the rights or the title to these not know whoe do decides to use this data and can these algorithms be trusted with our lives and hopes. Should the machines and only the machines decide whether or not we are eligible for a mortgage or insurance or what surgery or medicines we should receive . Cold andomed to a heartless future in which a computer says yes, or the computer says no, with the grim finality of an emperor in the arena . How do you plead with an algorithm . Howd you get it to see extenuating circumstances . And how do we know the machines have not been programmed to fool us or even to cheat us . We are already using all kinds of messaging services that offer instant communication at minimum cost. These same programs, platforms, can also be designed for realtime censorship of every conversation with offending words automatically deleted. Countries, this happens today. Digital authoritarianism is not , alas, the stuff of dystopian fantasy but an emerging reality, and the reason i am giving this the u. K. Is is that one of the worlds tech leaders. Some have been caught unawares by the unintended consequences of the internet. Farientific breakthrough more reaching in its everyday psychological impact than any other invention since gutenberg, and when you consider how long widespreadcome into circulation, the arrival of the is like Nuclear Power in that it is capable for good and harm, and, of course, it is not alone, as new technologies seem to race towards us from the far, and we strain our eyes to make out if they are good or bad, friends or foes. Ai, what does that mean . Helpful robots helping in caring for an aging population, or terminators sent back from the future to call the human race . Or biology, restoring our livers and our eyes, and miracle of a generation of tissues, or will it bring terrifying limitless limbless chickens to our tables . Will it bring tiny robots . With the literature, any scientific advance is punished by the gods. When prometheus brought fire to mankind in a tube of fennel, as you may remember, zeus punished up, whileining him his liver was pecked out. I told you about a hangover cure. His liver was picked out by an eagle, and every time his liver regroup, the eagle came back and picked it again, his liver andew, the eagle came back picked it again. And this went on forever, like my experience with brexit in the u. K. [laughter] some minister johnson if harlem and materia and had their way. The standard poetic practice to surrogates, if only they had never invented the ship, than jason never would have sailed, and all sorts of disasters would never have happened. It is human instinct to be wary of any kind of technical progress. 1829, they thought the human frame would not withstand the speeds of stephensons rocket, and today, there are people who are actually antiscience. A whole movement who are refused to who have recognize that vaccinations have eradicated smallpox and, therefore, endangering the very population they want to protect, and i totally reject this antiscientific pessimism. I am positive about the ability of new technology to serve as a liberator and to remake the world wondrously and benignly. Indeed, in this respect, technology is already doing just that. Nanotechnology. I mentioned earlier revolutionizing medicine with , its fraction of the size of the red blood cells capable swimming through our bodies, dispensing medicine, and attacking malignant cells like a star wars armada. There is a new generation giving the gift of hearing two people who otherwise would not be able to hear the voices of their own children. A London Technology company that has worked out how to help the blind to navigate more freely with nothing more than with an app on their smartphones, newtek is produced in britain, helping the deaf to hear and the blind to see. We used to think that britain is now 3ding there printing to make an engine capable of lasting a rocket in space. African countries, millions of People Without Bank accounts can now transfer money using a simple app. They can buy energy in one transaction, from no electricity to green power, and new advances are making Renewable Energy ever cheaper, aiding our struggle against climate change. Our understanding of the Natural World is being transformed by the discovery of the very essence of life itself, the secret genetic code that animates the spirit of every living being. Medical breakthroughs, the likes of which we have never known. Treatments tailored to the size the precise genetic makeup of people. Planet. X life on the think what we would achieve when, and it is a matter of when, we understand 1 or 2 , let alone 5 or 10 , but how, how we design the emerging technologies, these breakthroughs, and what values inform their design will shape the future of humanity, and that is my point to you tonight, my friends, excellencies. At stake is whether we have an orwellian world design for censorship and repression and control or a world of emancipation, debate, and , where Technology Threatens famine and disease but not our freedoms. Ago, this General Assembly adopted the universal declaration of human rights with no dissenting voices, uniting humanity for the first and perhaps the only time behind one set of principles, and our declaration, our joint declaration, upholds freedom of opinion and expression, the privacy of home and correspondence, and the right to seek and impart information and ideas. Unless we ensure that new ichnology begets this spirit, fear that our declaration will mean nothing and no longer hold, so the mission of the United Kingdom and for all who share our values must be to assure that the emerging technologies are designed from the outset for anddom, openness, pluralism, with the right safeguards in place to protect our peoples. Month by month, Vital Decisions are being taken on academic committees, company boardrooms, and industry standards groups. They are writing the rulebooks of the future, making ethical judgments, choosing what will or will not be rendered possible. To ensure thated new advances reflect our values by design. There is excellent work being done in the eu, and, of course, the u. N. , which has a vital role in ensuring that no country is excluded from the wonderful benefits of this technology and the Industrial Revolution it is bringing about, but we must be still more ambitious. We need to find the right balance between freedom and control, between innovation and regulation, between private enterprise and government oversight. We must insist that the ethical judgments inherent in the design of new technology are transparent to all, and we must make our voices heard more loudly in the standards bodies that write the rules. Agree on awe need to commonsense set of principles to shape the norms and standards that will guide the development of emerging technology, so, and here is the good news, i invite you next year to a summit in city, where,derful by the way, it is not raining 94 of the time, and whered one stage, when i was there shortly before we discovered that we had more good restaurants than paris, but the french somehow recovered by a process that i was not quite sure was entirely fair, but we still have, by far in the u. K. , by far, the biggest tech sector, by far the biggest tech sector, green technology,. Very kind of tech in london the biggest tech sector anywhere in your. Perhaps half a Million People working in tech, and i hope that you will come there, and we will seek to assemble the greatest possible coalition to take forward this vital task, building on all that the u. K. Contributes to this mission as a Global Leader in ethical and responsible technology. If we master this challenge, and i have no doubt that we can, then we will not only safeguard our ideals, we will surmount them, what once constrained humanity and concord perils that perilsded and conquer that once ended so many lives. We can transform our cities. Success will depend now as ever on freedom, openness, and pluralism. Thehuman spirit, releasing boundless ingenuity and inventiveness of mankind and which, above all, the United Kingdom will strive to preserve and advance. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your kind attention. [applause] minister of england and northern ireland. [applause]