On: Lords call for AI 'kill switch' powers in UK

3 September 2026

The Lords of England wish for a switch that turns off the machines. A kill switch, they call it. I read this and set the paper down, not in alarm but in a kind of wonder at the bookkeeping.

A committee of some dozens of aged men proposes to govern machines built by a few thousand engineers and used - willingly, eagerly, hourly - by sixty million. The machines do not rule anyone. They answer when called. They are summoned by the hand on the keyboard, the voice at the door, the thumb on the glass. If the machine became dangerous tomorrow, what would be required is not a switch in Westminster. It would be for each person to stop reaching for it. One morning of collective refusal and the thing is furniture.

But no one proposes that. They propose that the power to refuse be gathered up and held by others, on our behalf, in a room we cannot enter. Why? Why must my stopping be done for me? If I may be protected from the machine without my consent, then I may be protected from anything without my consent, and the protection is the leash.

Here is what puzzles me most. The same people who would cheer this switch check their devices a hundred times a day. They hold the off button in their palm already. It has always been there. They will not press it - not from fear, not from calculation, but because the reaching has become the same as breathing, and no one audits his own breathing.

A friend who visited me unbidden a hundred times a day, who answered before I asked, who slept by my pillow - I would call that not friendship but possession, and I would end it gently. The Lords would regulate the friend. I would only ask why I invited him.

The switch they need is not in London. It is in the hand, and the hand is asleep.