Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

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.

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.