Superintelligent AI

Lord Bishop of Hereford Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Hereford]

My Lords, it is appropriate that this debate happens the day after the Church celebrated the life and work of the great divine Thomas Aquinas, one of the founding intellectual fathers of western thought, because this debate cuts to the very heart of how we understand ourselves.

Our debate is about the regulation of superintelligence. We know that intelligence is simply

“the ability to learn, understand and think in a logical way about things; the ability to do this well”.

Superintelligence is, presumably, the ability to do this much better than we can. If this were all we were talking about, exercised by a machine in the service of the common good, there would be little to fear. I imagine many noble Lords will have referred to ChatGPT or other agents—for research purposes only—in their contributions to your Lordships’ House. The results of AI in medical diagnostics, drug discovery, robotics and even self-driving cars promise many benefits to us all. These manifestations of machine intelligence are a welcome technological development—although there is another debate to be had on their potentially catastrophic implications for employment, a view held by many AI company CEOs and reported in the Financial Times this morning.

However, what many in the sector fear is not so much focused tools but an intelligence that can effectively think for itself, devise goals and strategies and have independent agency, analogous to how we human beings make choices. Thomas Aquinas was prescient when he said:

“The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues”.


When we make decisions in your Lordships’ House, intelligence is but one factor. Of greater value is wisdom, as we were reminded by the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, in his response to my right reverend friend the Bishop of Coventry’s maiden speech on Tuesday. Noble Lords will have heard a definition of the difference: intelligence recognises that tomatoes are fruit; wisdom does not put them in a fruit salad.

Beyond that, I argue that our decisions are frequently motivated by love, which Aquinas defines as

“to will the good of another”.

These things will come together in our deliberations in your Lordships’ House on assisted dying on Friday. For some of us, love leads in the direction of permitting a choice to end incurable suffering; others are convinced that love demands the retention of the law as it stands to prevent coercion of the vulnerable, while in no sense lacking compassion in holding that view. Love drives us to different conclusions. We come to these conclusions, compromise and maybe even change our minds as we reflect together.

It is hard to see how this can be captured in an algorithm. Actions flowing from intelligence alone can be very bad ones indeed. Many at the forefront of developing AI recognise this, while some actors are seeking to incorporate virtue in machine decisions. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, writes optimistically of “machines of love and grace”, for example. Others most certainly are not. Early experimental examples of super AI have prioritised their own survival, even to the extent of threats of blackmail to their programmers when it was proposed to switch them off. Your Lordships demonstrate in this House a combination of the intelligence, wisdom and love, and deliberating in community that are the heart of our humanity and mutual relationships. Until such time as these virtues can be woven into machines, with the protections to shut them down safely, an international moratorium is the only safe way forward, and I would urge His Majesty’s Government to pursue it.