My Lords, I wish to thank the usual channels for allowing me to hold this debate today and the parliamentary staff who have enabled it to happen.
In the Bible, the writer of the Book of Hebrews says of human beings:
“You made them a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honour and put everything under their feet”.
God created human beings in His own image, with glory and honour—each and every one of us, regardless of who we are or what we do. We carry an inherent dignity and immeasurable value. This is not in spite of our weakness, vulnerabilities or limitations but in many ways because of and through them. God made us to be relational beings, in need of Him and in need of others, not sufficient on our own.
I start here because, fundamentally, our vision of what it is to be human—of our glorious humanity—must inform the rest of our debate about technology and AI. Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas begins here too. God made us creative beings, and AI and wider technologies are a remarkable product of human creativity. They have led to extraordinary discoveries and breakthroughs at speeds that we could never have imagined. They have connected us across the globe and opened up endless new opportunities for working, creating, learning and travelling. I now carry vast information, processing power and connectivity potential in my pocket with me every day.
My Lords, I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for securing this debate and for the way she has just introduced it. Alongside the Pope’s recent encyclical, moral leadership in this issue is vital.
I should declare my interest in Century-Tech, Goodnotes and the Good Future Foundation, and as a member of your Lordships’ Communications and Digital Committee. I should also confess that I have two main collaborators. Both are called Claude: one is my wonderful wife, and the other is an AI product from Anthropic. Both are great sounding boards. One is brilliant at advising me, looking after me and bring me joy. The other helped me summarise the philosophical positions on relationships that inform my contribution to this debate.
The genius of the likes of Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis have combined computer science and neuroscience to create machines that out-compete what Aristotle described as the essence of being human—the rational animal—with AI machines that learn, make choices and simulate friendship and intimacy. Yesterday’s Guardian carried an interview with Joanna Stern, who spent a year inviting AI to do nearly everything for her. Her encounter with a companion AI was most striking. What scared her, she said, was
“putting … your emotions in the hands of the machines”.
My Lords, like the noble Lord, I congratulate the most reverend Primate on this very timely debate and her powerful speech, which will repay reading carefully. I also am delighted to follow the former leader of the Mendip District Council, who at least knows where North Hill is, and I agree with almost every word of his speech as well.
I am going to be accused, no doubt, by some of my colleagues—perhaps even one or two sitting on my right—of crying wolf, because I too am going to call for regulation. But I remind noble Lords that at the end of the fairy tale there is a real wolf. As recursive self-improvement arrives—it may have already arrived—and machines can design machines more intelligent than themselves without our intervention and our control, we are in a completely new world, pace President Milei of Argentina in the Financial Timesyesterday. As my late friend Jim Lovelock, he of the Gaia hypothesis, used to say at the end of his long life, “Of course machines are the next stage in evolution. But it’ll be all right: they’ll keep some of us in a zoo for sentimental reasons”. I am not entirely sure I want my grandchildren to live in a zoo.
As the Pope points out, this industrial revolution, unlike the nuclear revolution, is different. It is more like the first one, because the origins of it all come in the private sector, and the Governments are trailing along behind. Among those founders, there are very good people. I happen to believe, like the noble Lord who has just spoken, that in Demis Hassabis we have not only a near genius but a man with a strong moral compass. The work that he and John Jumper did to solve the protein folding problem with AlphaFold is of huge benefit to medicine.
My Lords, like the previous two speakers, I thank the most reverend Primate for choosing this topic for her day’s debate. As has already been said, it is quite striking that she chose it, as His Holiness the Pope also chose it for his first encyclical, because it is a matter of great concern.
Before I come to the concerns, I want to emphasise that there is a very positive dimension to all this. Technological development has brought us huge benefits in communication, in medicine, and in so many aspects of our lives. But sometimes we forget that, when we talk about artificial intelligence, we are talking about something knowledge based and cognitive, and human intelligence is something different from that. Human intelligence involves the emotional dimension of us, and it is that very fact which enables us to operate in a different kind of way. So rather than simply reflecting on the challenges and dangers associated with technology—of course, it has brought us many benefits, but also many dangers—as we look at things like the environmental crisis or the potential for nuclear holocaust, we should note that these have also been brought to us by technological development, and we need always to manage and control it.
As we travel across London, we may reflect on the fact that driving in a car nowadays is not much quicker than a horse-drawn carriage was 100 years ago. Even so, we have the capacity for speed, so we have to regulate speed. Why? It is not because speed is bad, but because human beings can react only at a certain speed and a certain rate. We can adapt ourselves only at a certain rate. There are limitations to being a human being, as well as advantages and benefits.
My Lords, I too thank the most reverend Primate for her wonderful introduction, and indeed acknowledge the intervention of His Holiness Pope Leo, who I had the privilege of meeting at the Vatican on this subject some months ago.
The relationship between humanity and AI is often described through the language of alignment, as if it were a technical requirement. An AI system is considered aligned if it advances the intended objectives and misaligned if it pursues unintended consequences. However, before we ask whether a machine is pursuing the intended goals, we must first ask who gets to define those goals. That is not a technical question, but a political one. AI is brilliant—it is able to identify cancers, anticipate environmental disasters, accelerate scientific research and improve productivity. It will transform human life. But technology is never neutral. Every technology reflects a decision about who benefits, who bears the risks and who gets to decide. Every other industry, from pharmaceuticals to aviation, and from nuclear power to the sewer system, is regulated to ensure that private gain is balanced against the public good. Yet the tech sector has spent 30 years arguing that it should be the exception and it continues to make that argument about AI.
We have already seen the cost of tech exceptionalism on the bodies and minds of our children, and in our public discourse, deserted high streets and the weakening trust in our democratic institutions. Those outcomes were not technical errors; they were predictable consequences of a business model designed to maximise engagement, capture markets and minds, and create indispensable, if unreliable, intermediaries to all aspects of human life. The systems were aligned perfectly. They did exactly what they were designed to do, but they were aligned with commercial incentives rather than the public interest, or, as Pope Leo would put it, the common good. That matters, because many of the same companies, investors and assumptions are now shaping the next generation of intelligence systems.
My Lords, it is a great honour to speak in this debate. It will sound increasingly like an echo chamber in the themes that are raised but, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, with all that she has done in this sector, is remarkable.
I start by paying tribute to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. She gave a magnificent speech. I speak on behalf of many, I believe, in saying how delighted we are that she is the Archbishop of Canterbury. She learned humanity at the bedside. Those of us who have been involved in health know that it is the nurse who really is closest to the patient at times of suffering, difficulty and frailty. That shone through in her remarks today. We are privileged indeed that she is our archbishop. We all pay tribute to her for the topic of the day, following on from the Pope’s encyclical.
The most reverend Primate cannot have all the glory, however, because the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford deserves a great deal of recognition for his steadfast tenacity on the importance of ethics in relation to AI and human-centred AI. Indeed, former Archbishop Welby, who made such a big and profound difference for so many of us, supported the Rome call for AI ethics in 2024, so there is a continuity about this.
My Lords, I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for bringing this timely debate. I declare my interests as a technology consultant, an adviser on AI policy and a director of companies and organisations involved in AI and AI governance.
I support this Motion because Al is not merely another tool; it is increasingly a mediator of work, knowledge, attention and relationships. Unlike earlier technologies, AI moves at digital speed and can spread at very low marginal cost through existing digital infrastructure, entering our phones, homes, classrooms, hospitals and friendships, automating not only labour but judgment, creativity, companionship and trust.
A small number of firms and countries now command many of the models and much of the compute and data on which others increasingly rely on. This makes AI not only an economic race but a governance challenge. Like all nations, we cannot afford to fall behind. AI will be central to productivity, public service reform and national competitiveness. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that around 40% of UK occupations are exposed to AI, with most likely to be complemented rather than replaced. We must therefore be ambitious, innovative and open to enterprise.
Innovation and responsibility are not opposites: trustworthy AI should become one of Britain’s competitive strengths. The dilemma is clear: move too slowly, and we risk economic decline and dependence; move too quickly, and we might embed systems that erode dignity, privacy, fairness and trust. Governance must include technologists and investors, but must not be left to them alone. Ethicists, teachers, parents, clinicians, workers, entrepreneurs, civil society, young people and parliamentarians must all have a voice.
My Lords, I too join the chorus in thanks to the most reverend Primate for her excellent and thoughtful introduction to this debate—and, of course, for the impeccable timing. As we have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Knight, Anthropic’s co-founder has called for a “brake” on AI. At the same time, we are hearing from Cambridge that artificial intelligence has developed a vaccine. I argue—I hope the most reverend Primate agrees with me—that divine intervention is at work. Putting God at the centre of our thinking, as a person of faith, I also accept that technology shapes our life in the modern age. Yet behind these changes, we should never forget, as we have been reminded by a number of speakers, that it is the human mind that gave birth to that new idea and that technological advancement.
I grew up in a very close-knit family. Discussions around the dinner table were not optional and not merely encouraged; they were vital and part of our fabric. My father likened the advent of the mobile phone age as the start of the decline in the art of human conversation. Calculations, he said, were not for calculators but for the mind—he was an accountant. Yet to my children’s generation, AI is and will become a greater part of their lives. I recall my youngest son—who will be embarrassed by my reference to him—expressing total disbelief that my childhood had no mobile phones or internet. Indeed, he refers to that golden age and my father’s words as “the ancient times when Daddy was a child”.
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But this extraordinary product of human creativity and the power it places in our hands also raise urgent new questions. What are the implications for our human relationships, for our connections with family and friends? How does it impact on our working lives and the existence or quality of our jobs? What are the implications for warfare, for climate change and for our engagement with information and democracy? Just because we could create something or deploy technology in a certain way, does that mean we should? As CS Lewis put it:
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer”.
Wave after wave of technological innovation is taking place as we speak. The question we should be asking is simple: where are we going? What is our vision for how this technology will serve human flourishing? We are in danger of unleashing AI into our lives and societies without the theological, philosophical and spiritual framework with which to make decisions about creating, controlling, using or directing it.
Above all, we need to ensure that AI is being designed, built, regulated and used to serve our glorious humanity and not to diminish it—to be pro-human. As Pope Leo has said,
“humanity—in all its grandeur and woundedness—must never be replaced or surpassed”.
This poses the question: does AI make human life more human? The question matters for those designing, developing and building the technology as they think about what ideologies and belief systems should underpin the models, for there is no such thing as value-neutral technology.
This matters for Governments and policymakers as they determine what should and should not be permitted and regulated, and it matters for those using the technology. Many feel that AI is affecting them hugely without having any say in the matter. Others feel that the things which make us unique as humans are at risk of being eroded, devalued and replaced by AI as people turn to chatbots rather than other human beings for comfort and wisdom in moments of loneliness, loss, anxiety or pain. How should we adopt AI and what is the right place for it in our relationships, our families and our societies?
If humanity is to be placed at the centre of all thinking and decisions about AI, I would like to suggest that there are three fundamental questions to help us to work out what a pro-human framework for AI would look like, and how it informs practice. First, what does it mean to be human? If God crowned humans with glory and honour, how will AI respect—indeed, cultivate—that sort of dignity and value?
There are many ways in which AI is helping to enhance human dignity and to protect and uphold life. If you want to look to the potential of AI to serve human beings, you need look no further than across the sciences. In nursing, we can see the potential of AI. Nursing and medical care are areas where the value of human dignity is visible in some of the most tangible, practical ways. I do not believe that a robot or an AI model will or should ever replace human beings in some of these settings. Sitting at the bedside of a patient to deliver very difficult news or supporting a woman through the delivery of her baby are deeply vulnerable moments where human touch, eye contact and human emotional intelligence are invaluable.
However, there are many ways in which AI is having a hugely positive impact on healthcare. AI is beginning to make childbirth safer, from automated ultrasound to predictive tools for pre-eclampsia to consistent foetal heart rate monitoring. There are, sadly, other uses of AI today which, rather than enhancing human dignity, are providing new ways of degrading it or violating it. A recent report from Durham University presented evidence that chatbots are now facilitating violence against women and girls, allowing roleplay of incest, child sexual abuse and rape with few safeguards, risking the normalisation and the legitimisation of such abuse. These harms are not simply the result of user misuse. AI platform design choices, policies and governance failures are encouraging and enabling them, and existing regulation is wholly inadequate to prevent them.
My second question is: what are we here for, and what gives our lives meaning and purpose? The Christian faith teaches that we are designed for relationship—with God, with others and with the created world around us. We find meaning and purpose in these relationships and in dignified work, where we can partner with God to see His kingdom come on earth. We are human beings crowned with glory and honour, here to glorify God.
Perhaps one of the most profound areas of purpose is work. We are already seeing record numbers of 18 to 24 year-olds in neither education, training nor employment, and this is only set to worsen as agentic AI starts to come online. One area of the greatest gravity that this debate must address is how we as the political class are going to help young people navigate a rapidly changing world.
Yet AI impacts our sense of meaning in other ways that go beyond work. A fundamental quality of a human being, one source of our well-being and sense of purpose, is our ability to create, imagine, think and invent. God placed humans in the Garden of Eden to look after the garden. He asked Adam to name the animals and species there, an inherently creative task.
On one hand, AI can enhance human creativity and imagination. It puts more information, people, networks and tools at our disposal. It can increase efficiency and take away the burden of more repetitive and administrative tasks. But there are reasons to be concerned that AI is in fact having the opposite effect on our human abilities. There is already concerning evidence about the impact of technology, particularly smartphones, on the human ability to think and create. Mary Harrington wrote an article last year entitled “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good”. It highlights evidence of human brain power decreasing, with adult literacy scores levelling off and declining in the past decade in the majority of OECD countries, and some of the sharpest declines are among the poorest.
Child literacy is also declining. Research shows that children who are exposed to more than two hours a day of recreational screen time have worse working memory, processing speeds, attention levels, language skills and executive function than children who are not. A study has shown that heavy users of AI struggle more with critical thinking as they stop thinking for themselves, and their capability atrophies. The irony is that while AI might make us feel like we are more creative, AI’s inherent nature means that, at scale, ideas will in fact become more predictable, unoriginal and homogenised.
The human ability to think and create surpasses the capabilities of AI. We must work to ensure that our human abilities are given space to grow and thrive—to be the thinking, creative beings that God has made us to be. The Pope put this well last November during a live address to young people at the National Catholic Youth Conference in Indianapolis:
“be prudent; be wise; be careful that your use of AI does not limit your true human growth. Use it in such a way that if it disappeared tomorrow, you would still know how to think, how to create, how to act on your own, how to form authentic friendships. Remember, AI can never replace that unique gift that you are to the world”.
My third question is: what is truth? Pilate notoriously asked Jesus this question as he was being sentenced to death. According to the Christian faith, truth is not something we define ourselves or alter to suit our own personal, political or commercial ends. Truth is embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, and expressed in loving God and loving others. Truth is a fundamental foundation on which our personal lives and societies are built. Without common truth, a flourishing common life becomes impossible.
Generative AI cannot tell right from wrong or facts from fiction. Instead of truth, it produces a statistical echo of what has been said before in material it has been trained on. It reinforces biases inherent in the way that it has been coded, as well as social biases present in the material it has been fed. It also simply invents information. One study found that chatbots did this at least 3% of the time, some as much as 27%.
Even more concerning is that AI can be weaponised by malign actors. It is the perfect tool for someone wanting to create fake news. Its ability to disperse disinformation, discredit legitimate information, censor other information and game algorithms has the potential to distort and rewrite reality—to present fiction as fact, and all with a veneer of objective truth. It has the power to manipulate what we see and what we believe at a speed and scale never seen before. What is often presented as a tool in the democratisation of knowledge could, all too easily, become the tool of the autocrat.
The potential for real harm is still to be fully realised. There is a serious risk that this will lead to a fundamental breakdown in trust across society. The real danger is not our rising gullibility, but our rising cynicism. It is not that we will believe anything; it is that we will believe nothing. If we cannot trust information we see online, then perhaps we cannot trust the people we meet. When the possibility for trust in another human being is eroded, relationships cannot be formed, nor can much of what we do in communities or our society be sustained. Without a common understanding of truth, human relationships and the reciprocal ties which underpin our societal structures flounder. Truth and the trust it inspires, between people and within societies, must be cherished and protected.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed when considering the current and potential impacts of AI on life as we know it. What can be done to ensure that AI serves humanity and does not degrade it? Uninventing AI is not an option, nor would we want to be without the many positive effects that it brings, so what are we to do with technology which places great power in the hands of those who own, control and use it? Power is not inherently wrong, but it carries great responsibility and often great risks for human beings, as we have seen repeatedly through history. Power corrupts, and it takes people of great virtue and moral strength to withstand its temptations.
Archbishop William Temple described a central occupation of Christian social thought as being man’s dignity, tragedy and destiny. I have spoken today of humanity’s inherent dignity, but it is our fallenness—the tragedy—which makes technology’s power so seductive and the risk of its abuse so often our story. In the Christian tradition, there is a call that overrides the lust for power; it is the call to service. The distinctive Christian version of service is sacrifice, and Jesus’s life, death and resurrection is the perfect example.
This leads to the third of Temple’s triad: destiny. Jesus’s sacrifice for us on the cross offers profound hope to all humanity in every season and every circumstance. It also offers for us a model of living a sacrificial lifestyle—one where, with Him at work in us, we choose to sacrifice our own personal ends in the service of others and begin to see the kingdom come on earth. Within this, I believe, lies the hope of our relationships, families and societies. At every level of society—from individuals making decisions about how to use AI personally and with our families and children, to business owners choosing where to use AI in their processes and how this affects their workers, to owners of AI companies choosing what technology they invent and the features or limits they place on this—we can choose to make decisions sacrificially in the service of our common humanity.
We must cultivate the character to deal with the opportunities, challenges and temptations that such powerful technology places in our hands personally and corporately, involving people, communities and civil society in conversations about AI, drawing on the wisdom and insights of faith communities. Technology this revolutionary must not simply be unleashed on our societies; it must be developed with us, and for us, at a human pace with human objectives. Above all, with our common and glorious humanity, we must put people ahead of our profit, convenience or technological progress at all costs and ensure that we harness AI to serve humanity, and to be an extraordinary tool in the creation of a more just, abundant and hope-filled world. I beg to move.
She came home and hugged her children, saying she never wanted them to have
“a relationship with a chatbot”.
That is already the reality for many. Male Allies UK surveyed 1,000 boys aged 12 to 16 and found that 26% preferred the attention of an AI companion to real human connection. We must act urgently to prevent this consigning a generation to fester in their bedrooms, spiralling into mental health crisis as their addiction to phones gets deeper and darker.
AI has no ethics, none of Heidegger’s mortality or self-awareness. We must listen to Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, who yesterday called for “a brake” on AI. There is a real risk of superintelligent AI systems being developed that could act autonomously from human control, learn their own language to collaborate with each other and present an existential threat to our species. Big tech and AI are already accelerating a breakdown of trust and a rise of division. The attention economy pulls us into echo chambers and away from human-edited media. It is simple to create fake content and distort truth. It is now easy for foreign actors, hackers and shameless populists to spark outrage, then protests and violence, as seen this week. We must make it as easy to be pro-social with these tools as it is to be anti-social. We must do something about addiction by design.
Then, there is education and work. The Milburn review is a wake-up call: there are 1 million NEETs, 7% of 14 to 16 year-olds are unfit for work, and there is a growing mental health crisis among the young. Our obsession with testing in schools is creating a system that alienates too many people, training them to absorb content and produce predicted answers, much as we train AI models, and which AI does better. Young people know that, and they are losing hope as they lose their place in the labour market, whether or not they passed their tests.
AI can help teachers and release them to focus on the human-to-human aspect of their endeavour. But curriculum, pedagogy and assessment must change to nurture empathy, judgment and care for oneself, for others and for the planet. We do not yet know the impact of AI on work, but we know that work is really important for giving people routine, purpose and positivity as social animals. However, we can predict that intelligent robots and software will take over more screen-based work, and more production and service delivery. I suspect that we now need people who can thrive in a relational economy. We will value the personal when we are buying. We already crave authenticity, live performance, the kitchen table at the restaurant for those who can afford it, and the bespoke service or product. That is where the future lies. Future work will not be so much in data centres or in software development; it will be in human contact, unique service and quirky creation. We need an education system that stops standardising humans and nurtures individuals capable of love, empathy and judgment, who can craft, create and communicate. Then, our society will be resilient to the threat of AI and grasp its extraordinary opportunities.
I make a final comment: all this needs the Government and Parliament to have backbone and regulate AI. There may be some who are worried about what that means for a US trade deal. My advice to Ministers is to put the future of our society, our cohesion and our children first.
But then there is a potential wolf. Have a look at Evo 2, also a triumph of huge potential, trained on, I believe, 9 trillion nucleotides. It can read the entire blueprint of life. It is in open source. It has guardrails in it, but there are those who say those guardrails can already be got around, for those who want to seek to weaponise bioweapons. We need the humanities to remind us of the possibilities. The most reverend Primate referred to CS Lewis—have a look again at That Hideous Strength of 1945. Have a look at a rather different sort of writer, Gore Vidal, who imagined in Kalki a mad religious purifier wanting to purify the world of sin with a bioweapon. He wrote that in 1978. We need our humanities departments to help us think about the issues here and not leave it to the techies, wonderful though many of them are. Our humanities departments in universities are under very great pressure at the moment. We need philosophers; we need people like Iain McGilchrist reminding us of the left brain/right brain division. We need the Pope, and we need the right reverend Primate, to remind us of humanity.
We need to move fast. A recent study by Barclays Bank predicts that between 70% and 90% of the jobs in installation and repair, manufacturing, construction and warehousing may be taken by humanoid robots—they will be humanoid, because the world is built by us to fit humans—and that will happen over the next 10 to 15 years. So 70% to 90% of those jobs may be gone.
We in this country, thanks partly to the patriotism of Demis Hassabis, Geoffrey Hinton and others, are players in this world. We have a constellation of start-ups and of people thinking about these issues, which makes us among the principal three in the world—far behind America and China, but significant. Thanks to the former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, we are in a good position in relation to regulation, because our AISI is widely regarded as among the best of its kind in the world. So yes, we must encourage our start-ups and, yes, we must find wider pools of capital to support them, as the Government are trying to do, to be fair to them. Yes, we must think of regulation.
My final, and short, point is this. We must not be nationalistic about this technology. We made that terrible mistake with nuclear. A predecessor of mine as Minister of Science, much more distinguished than me, who subsequently sat on the Woolsack, said that it was near treason to select the PWR reactor rather than the AGR reactor, because the first was American and the second was all British. Poppycock. We should buy what is best. We should make the public sector an intelligent and careful buyer, but we should not fail to buy the best, from wherever it is produced.
Sometimes, the benefits lead us to difficulties. I was a psychiatrist for a long time and dealt with young people with addictions for a period. One reason that medications become addictive is not that they are unsuccessful but precisely that they are extremely successful, at, for example, getting rid of anxiety. Therefore, people quickly get used to reducing their level of anxiety with medication rather than with psychological mechanisms and with relationships with other people. It is the very effectiveness of one dimension of thinking that makes this dangerous for us.
If we look at the human dimension, we need to understand that, for example, speed and a response, albeit sometimes not a correct response, is not something that human beings function well with. When we lose someone, we need a period of time to manage our grief in relation with others. This is not a component of artificial intelligence. In order that we have the possibility of hope, we need to understand the possibility of frustration and the time it takes to accomplish things.
The parents who create some of the greatest problems for young people nowadays are not only those who do not give them appropriate attention but those who give them too much attention. Winnicott devised the idea of “good enough” parenting. One sees many parents who react immediately to children and respond to every wish that they have, without considering other possibilities, and do not understand that this is harmful to their young people because it does not help them to develop the capacity to deal patiently with problems, reflect upon them, deal with grief and find hope emerging. None of these are qualities that artificial intelligence either has or has the capacity to develop.
I therefore make an appeal that, as we talk about artificial intelligence, we should understand it to be something fundamentally different from how we function as human beings. The more deeply we can understand how we function as individuals and as communities of people, the better position we will be in to address the challenges that arise from artificial intelligence.
It is not just that these are problems for the future. It is absolutely clear that we already face many difficulties that emerge from the fact that young people now look around and see a world where there is environmental threat, where there is the possibility of nuclear war and where they do not understand how they are going to deal with artificial intelligence. We ought to reflect on the epidemic of adolescent mental health problems, ADHD and autism. Are these things not related to anything? Are they only better diagnoses, or are there things happening that are making life difficult for the next generation?
While much of the public debate focuses on future dangers of superintelligence, joblessness and the world of unprovable truth, it risks distracting us from the more immediate. AI is already shaping our economy and society. It influences what we see, what we believe and, increasingly, what opportunities are available to us. It is already transferring huge sums of money from the UK to Silicon Valley, while concentrating control over increasingly essential infrastructure in the hands of a very small number of corporations. We are living through an extraordinary moment in which perhaps the greatest technological opportunity in human history is also becoming one of the greatest transfers of power and wealth in history—a heist in plain sight.
Our religious leaders are asking us to judge artificial intelligence not by what it can do but by whether it serves human dignity and the common good. That sounds simple, but it is truly radical. It means asking political questions about how we deploy technology. Does it distribute power? Does it strengthen families? Does it create dignified work? Does it increase human agency? And, ultimately, who are the beneficiaries?
Beyond that, it demands political leadership. In this House, we have tried to provide that leadership. We have argued that citizens should benefit from the value of their creative labour, that the data in our public institutions should be treated as a sovereign asset, that computer-generated evidence should be reliable and that AI systems should be tested to ensure they cannot create child sexual abuse. We have argued that chatbots should be subject to the law like every other actor in society. That is what alignment looks like in practice: not a technical specification but a democratic one. I ask the Minister to explain why the Government have repeatedly rejected measures designed to secure democratic oversight, accountability and sovereignty, and what plans they have to ensure that we live under the rules of UK democracy and not those of Silicon Valley terms of service.
As the most reverend Primate said, artificial intelligence already offers enormous benefits to humanity across science, education and industry, with the potential to increase productivity, solve complex problems and improve quality of life. We welcome those advances, nowhere more than in healthcare. As the most reverend Primate said, AI is helping clinicians detect diseases, personalise treatments and improve patient outcomes. It is transforming medical research; the work of DeepMind, through AlphaFold, and of Isomorphic Labs, has demonstrated AI’s remarkable potential to accelerate drug delivery by predicting the structure of proteins and helping researchers identify promising new treatments at unprecedented speed. What once took years of painstaking laboratory work can increasingly be accomplished in a fraction of the time, bringing hope to millions. It reminds us that AI is not just a technological advance: it has the potential to become the greatest tool for human flourishing ever created. If harnessed wisely, it can help us live longer, healthier and more productive lives.
Of course, innovation and governance must go hand in hand. This week, noble Lords have been rediscussing the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, which was my first Bill when I became a Minister. This was a new technology, creating a life outside the body, and it needed different regulation: subtle, complex and long-lasting. Now, it needs updating. It was difficult to organise that regulation and this is a whole new challenge—but it has to happen. We have to strike the right balance between encouraging the development of technologies that benefit humanity while ensuring that they do not undermine human dignity, security, freedom or well-being.
We need not only to address the problems of AI that are here and now, but to understand and forestall the problems of AI that are to come, which could dwarf those we face today. There are the fast-burn problems of advanced AI in the hands of bad actors or the loss of control of an advanced AI; there are also the slow-burn problems we are just starting to confront, including the erosion of jobs leading to many of people being deprived of a job, career and sense of purpose in their lives, and the threat of gradual disempowerment and enfeeblement of human beings, as has been said. No one knows how to avoid the fast-burn problems, but supposing those potentially catastrophic threats are solved, it is the slow-burn problems we will have to contend with.
Rather than addressing the problems of today—troubling though they are—we must show our concern for the rapidly advancing future. It is a future we have not asked for that is being imposed on us by a few tech barons, backed by massive amounts of money. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford rightly asked in his response to the King’s Speech, where are the laws binding development of superintelligent AI? Those who want to have several sleepless nights need only read Yudkowsky and Soares’ recent book. Do we want AI that is more capable than a human in all significant respects or and AI that none of us knows how to control?
Enlightened governance, transparency and safety measures are not obstacles to innovation; they are essential means. We must address the potentials of the future now. Humanity has a challenge on its hands; it is one we can meet, but only if we combine wisdom with innovation, ethics with progress and a steadfast commitment to ensuring that technology remains the servant of humanity, not its master.
AI may deepen existing divides. Countries and companies with compute, data, talent and capital will shape the terms of use. Communities with access to AI-enhanced education, healthcare and employment may pull ahead, while those exposed mainly to surveillance, misinformation or job disruption may fall further behind. Successful companies create jobs, wealth, tools and opportunity. But democracy must be capable of scrutinising concentrations of economic, informational and infrastructural power moving at this speed.
More than half the people in the UK aged 16 and over use generative AI. Around one in eight users reports using AI as someone to talk to or as a friend—and the figure is even higher in the United States. Evidence on long-term effects is still limited, but the risk is clear. Digital platforms already shape identity and social habits, especially among young people, but generative AI goes further. It talks back, remembers, flatters and can simulate intimacy. Young people may increasingly turn to it for advice, reassurance and help with social situations: roles once shaped by parents, peers and teachers. AI companions do not require reciprocity. Real relationships involve patience, disagreement and obligation. We should not discover too late that human development has been reshaped by systems that simulate care without sharing responsibility.
AI’s benefits are real. In the NHS, AI can reduce administrative burdens, triage referrals, predict missed appointments and support cancer screening. In education, it can help teachers plan lessons and create resources—though it must not weaken teacher-pupil relationships or critical thinking. However, we must also plan for the environmental cost. AI data centres need significant electricity and water. That is not an argument against AI infrastructure, but for building it with resilient energy and water planning from the start.
Some of these questions cannot be answered within our borders alone. In July, the United Nations will host the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva, which I hope to attend. The UK should help shape global rules that are innovative, entrepreneurial and at the same time democratic, humane and inclusive. The questions raised by artificial intelligence are not only technical and economic; they are about what kind of society we wish to live in, how work is valued, how children learn and form relationships, and how innovation and enterprise can serve the common good.
I welcome the Government’s efforts to place the UK at the forefront of safe and responsible AI. As that work develops, I hope Ministers will continue to consider AI’s wider social impacts, including on children, loneliness, education, work, public services, competition and democratic trust, and ensure that Parliament remains engaged in that conversation. The Motion before us invites us to take these questions seriously and to bring together expertise from across society. I support it wholeheartedly, and hope this debate contributes to the Government’s wider work, and to the national and international conversation about what AI is, whom it serves and how it can be directed towards the common good.
Behind this humour lies a serious challenge. AI is no longer a distant concept; it is not science fiction. That reality presents extraordinary opportunities and, in terms of defining human relationships, an ever-evolving challenge. In relation to faith, I have seen AI search scripture and provide visual and interactive learning at the touch of a button. AI is changing learning, as we have already heard. Remote villages can access knowledge once the bastion of the greatest universities. In medicine, doctors can diagnose and treat illnesses more quickly and even remotely. Scientific discoveries may now take months rather than years. The potential for human advancement through AI is incredible. To quote Captain Kirk from “Star Trek”, “the final frontier” is being realised not just in space but right here on earth.
Technology has always been most powerful not when it changes operations but when it changes human behaviour. The printing press and the telephone transformed communication. The internet transformed connectivity. AI transforms relationships. That is why we must ask not only what AI can do but what it should do. Human relationships are built on qualities that cannot easily be coded: trust, empathy, compassion, loyalty, forgiveness and love. As the most reverend Primate reminded us, these are not algorithms; they are deeply human qualities fostered by the beating heart, the human mind and lived experiences. An AI system may tell us what someone is feeling, but understanding sorrow is not the same as experiencing grief. Simulating compassion is not the same as feeling it. A machine may generate a sympathetic response, but only a human heart truly cares. Yet we must also acknowledge that AI may help strengthen relationships, as we have heard, for families and for people with disabilities. Used wisely, AI can bring people together; used poorly, it can drive them apart.
We are already seeing a world where individuals can spend hours connected digitally while feeling increasingly disconnected emotionally. The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, made that point. If a machine becomes easier to talk to than another person, we may lose some of the patience essential to human relationships. After all, unlike AI, our spouses, children, friends and colleagues do not arrive—I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Knight, agrees with me—with “update settings” or “refresh” buttons. Some may seek it. I know my wife, in my absence as a Foreign Minister, probably sought it—unsuccessfully, I would argue.
Perhaps that is precisely the point. As we have heard, human relationships derive their value from their imperfections: the awkward conversation, the misunderstandings, the disagreements and the look. These are not flaws in humanity; they are part of what makes us exactly that—human. We must ensure that innovation is guided by ethics, that regulation keeps pace with capability and that human dignity remains at the centre of technological progress. Therefore, can the Minister say what the Government’s plans are on ensuring that these principles are upheld? What conversations about that are we having with partners?
In conclusion, we must teach future generations that, while artificial intelligence may be able to answer some questions, it is human intelligence, wisdom and compassion that give meaning to our lives. At least, that is the argument that my wife and I present to our three human wonders at home—their response is, “Hmm, we’re not convinced”. The future should be a partnership in which technology and AI enhance the best in humanity, as the most reverend Primate reminded us. If we get that balance right, artificial intelligence will not diminish human relationships; it will give us, perhaps, even more reason to value them.