Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Lord Frost Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the most reverend Primate for her excellent opening speech in this debate, which admirably set out the issues that I think ought to be concerning us.

AI is undoubtedly going to bring us many good things, but it is a technology different in nature from any we have had before, perhaps even since the invention of writing, or at least printing. It has an affective quality that no technology has ever had before it. We have already stopped noticing the fundamental novelty, and indeed the oddness, of being able to talk to a machine in normal human language and get a reply. We have never been able to do that before, and I worry a bit about the consequences.

I am not personally concerned that all this is happening because AI is in some way genuinely intelligent or even sentient. I do not believe that humans are capable of creating such a thing. Some, of course, do think that, and Chris Olah, a founder of Anthropic, said in front of the Pope last week that

“we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience … We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease”.

The problem with looking at things in this way is that confuses what is intelligible with what is intelligent.

The most reverend Primate the Archbishop mentioned CS Lewis earlier and, in what I am about to say, I draw on his great essay, Transposition, which is, as so often, a remarkable anticipation of current realities. A materialist looks at the human brain and thinks that brain activity and neuroscience can, in principle, explain everything. I look at the same phenomena and see higher realities, consciousness, the divine spark and things we do not fully understand—a fuller reality simply reflected in the lower reality of brain material, and showing up in neuroscience as that activity. If Chris Olah thinks that what he sees in AI mirrors human capacity in some way, it is because he looks at that lower activity in his AI model, notes that there is something similar in humans and assumes that they are the same thing. They are not. We have never shown that neuroscience can create consciousness; I do not believe we ever will. A mind cannot exist in a human-created machine. AI mimics intelligence but it is not, in itself, intelligent, as the Pope set out in Magnifica Humanitas.

My worry is that this leaves us with another kind of problem. That worry is set out in a very interesting recent essay in Nature by Mustafa Suleyman, now chief executive at Microsoft AI. He worries that people are starting to see AI as sentient even when it is not. As he puts it:

“When a system perfectly mimics intentionality and empathy, the human brain projects an inner life into it … We are hurtling into this era largely unprepared for the psychological fallout”.


I must say that I sympathise. I cannot think it good if large numbers of people think that their AI loves them. It is something anti-human, fundamentally “not normal”. It is especially worrying in a world where many people take a utilitarian view of humanity and believe human beings are nothing special and are somehow just computers embedded in a body.

Where I differ from those who have expressed similar concerns today is that I am sceptical about regulation as the way to solve these problems. Some noble Lords seem to have a, frankly, fantastical belief in the powers of the British state to control society, shape AI development and influence what is happening around the world. Even if we could regulate ourselves, I do not know that the Chinese Government, to take just one example, would do the same. There are things, however, that we can do as people. As a society, we should try to show as little social tolerance as we can for this idea of treating AI as a person, a disembodied adviser or some sort of daemon from one of Philip Pullman’s books. For the end of that road is moral and legal rights for machines, which would be a fundamentally destabilising and dangerous development. We cannot control the technology, but we can control our reaction to it.

We are not going to solve the problems presented by AI by seeking refuge in more and more government control; we will do it by maintaining our own confidence as people in the special nature of humanity and our fundamental difference from the technology, and hence our ability to master it and not be pulled in by the mesmerising quality of the machine. I must say that, as I believe myself, the established Abrahamic religions, with their integral concepts of the special divine nature of humanity, seem most likely to provide us with the concepts and moral strength to achieve this.

Fundamentally, to conclude, this is not a problem Governments can solve. It is a problem for society, for individuals and, therefore, for each one of us in what we say, what we believe and how we think.