Britain risks sleepwalking into a "ghastly, Orwellian, omniscient police state" unless it addresses the ethical dilemmas posed by new technologies such as facial recognition and artificial intelligence, the Met Commissioner has warned. Cressida Dick said while the digital age presented numerous opportunities to help in the fight against crime it was vital there was a strict legal framework to ensure it was not used inappropriately. In a speech delivered at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney, Australia, Ms Dick said it was important to remember that the role of technology and data was to enable humans "to make better decisions.'' She said: "We're now tiptoeing into a world of robotics, AI [artificial intelligence] and machine learning ... the next step might be predictive policing. "People are starting to get worried about that ... particularly because of the potential for bias in the data or the algorithm, [like] live facial recognition software."