Good evening. We would, of course, still be deep in national mourning if that driverless car really had done for Jeremy Clarkson.

And who knows, grief might have been such that the new technological revolution the Chancellor proclaimed in his budget today might have been stopped in its tracks.

As it is, Mr Hammond expects these autonomous cars to be on our roads in little over three years time. Part of the

explosive advance of so-called artificial intelligence that is not just changing our lives,

some would say it's controlling them. Already, computer algorithms, whatever they are, decide our

credit rating, what we will pay for things, how political campaigns are run, what news, real and fake we are fed,

what advertisements we see, and through dating apps, who we should love.

With the speed of development, apparently doubling every ten years or so,

robots on the battlefield may be next, and the replacement of humans by intelligent machines

in millions of less lethal jobs looks a certainty. There's talk of using the faultless logic of super-intelligent machines,

untroubled by emotional baggage or subjective notions of empathy in court cases,

and many areas where complex issues need to be decided.

We're increasingly entrusting our lives to things most of us don't understand. Amazing

technical advance, but is it moral progress or abdication? Do we want a driverless society? That's our

moral maze tonight. The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator on the Times, the former

Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo, Moina Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Edinburgh University,

and the Chief Executive of the RSA Matthew Taylor. Full disclosure here, he's on the Ethical Board of Britain's largest AI company, Artificial Intelligence Company. Is it ethically troubling, Matthew?

It is, and I think that the company that set up that board, Deep Mind, is doing it, because it recognizes the scale of the ethical challenges we have. And it's obvious that AI could bring great benefits, but also carries major, perhaps even existential risk. The question for me is whether our current understanding and debate about the ethical

challenges of accelerating technology is adequate. And my answer to that is a resounding no.

Melanie Phillips. I think it is troubling. It obviously brings some benefits, but I am particularly

troubled by the kind of dehumanising aspect of it. And I think that our society is in many other respects

treating human beings as of lesser and lesser value.

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