While much of the media attention last week was focused on the pomp and pageantry of Donald Trump’s state visit, there was also a £31 billion agreement to accelerate cooperation in tech, including artificial intelligence (AI), with investment from firms such as Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, and Salesforce.

East Hampshire could well benefit at least indirectly given its proximity to two of the UK’s identified regional tech hubs – the Thames Valley and the Central South, stretching down to Southampton.

AI is already shaping our daily lives, whether we realise it or not. Around 1 in 4 people say they’ve never used AI, but it may be more that they’ve never consciously used it. If you’ve asked Siri a question, been guided by a satnav, seen personalised recommendations on Netflix or Amazon, or had a spam email filtered out of your inbox, you’ve used AI.

AI offers huge potential. In healthcare, it’s being used to detect cancers earlier. In agriculture, it can analyse soil and weather data to increase crop yields. And in assistive technology, it’s supporting people with disabilities to live more independent lives. These are genuinely exciting developments.

But there are also big risks and drawbacks.

While it can help combat online misinformation, it can also be used to create more convincing deepfakes and disinformation in the first place. While it can generate smart lesson plans to ease teacher workloads, it can also tempt students to use AI to complete homework. And while it can increase workforce productivity and is creating new job opportunities, the biggest worry of all is how many jobs it could supplant.

There are different types. Machine learning has been around quite a while and powers much of what we use today. Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, is currently causing excitement for its ability to generate text, images and answer questions quickly. It’s fast and useful but can trip you up if you don’t double check your sources.

Agentic AI, which is at an earlier stage, has a degree of autonomy that can set a specific goal with limited supervision, mimicking human reasoning and decision making.

Clearly there will be a lot of practical, ethical and knock-on issues as AI continues to accelerate. There are also environmental concerns with the vast energy and water (for cooling) needs of data centres.

A current issue in Parliament is copyright, with Generative AI systems ‘trained’ on huge volumes of content – much of it created by others. Many local residents have contacted me with concerns about this and proposed changes to the law.

Given the scale of what’s at stake, I decided to join the ‘Parliamentary AI Scheme’ to learn more about the technology and to discuss the issues with MPs from across the political spectrum, as well as experts from business, academia and overseas parliaments.

It is clear that AI is not just one subject, but central to many issues we will be dealing with for years to come.