Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Lord Johnson of Lainston Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest. I am invested in AI companies, and I am hoping to go on the board of an AI company, because I think AI is the most amazing thing ever to happen to us. I cannot understand the long faces in this Chamber, the worry, the hand-wringing, about a technology that will change the world for the better. But it will be highly disruptive—I do not disagree with that. As we enter an age of abundance, I am pleased to say to the noble Lords opposite that it will become the end of capitalism. If resources can become effectively free, other things then become rationed. It could be leisure: if a billion people can go to Venice, obviously, how you access Venice will be determined by the capitalist principle of a market price. However, all the things we need to survive and thrive and enjoy ourselves will become free.

We are going to see massive disruption as a result— I do not disagree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford with regard to the future of work. While the artisanal classes will flourish as the cost of what they want comes down and the value of what they provide goes up, the white collar—mostly we noble Lords in this House—will be seriously disintermediated.

We are all saying that that is a bad thing, but it is not—it is a fabulous thing. Who wants to be an accountant, a lawyer, a consultant, a civil servant or even a doctor? Domain expertise will become irrelevant as technology takes over. We will not have to do these things. I do not belittle any noble Lord for having had a wonderful career, no doubt, in one of those occupations, and I do not want to sound flippant when I say that the end of those occupations will cause severe disruption to our body politic and society. But in the same way we do not say now, “Let’s get rid of our dishwasher or tumble dryer”, the fact is that the highest number of people in employment in 1900 were in domestic service, carrying water, heating it up, washing dishes and cleaning. No one wants to go back to that. We will be freed. We should look at this as the principle of freedom.

What worries me, though, is that we are not really thinking properly in government and in political parties about how this will affect society. That is why this debate, led by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, is so important. If I think of the extraordinary revolutionary change between my life and my children’s, we really now understand the brick wall we are heading into. If we do not do a handbrake turn now, we will have serious repercussions.

If I think of my life, I was born, I went to school, I left university at 21, I got a job, I did the same job for 30 years, I bought a car, I got married, I bought a house, I had children; soon I will retire, and then I will die. That is not a particularly exciting prospect—I am afraid most noble Lords will share the same fate. But my 18-year-old daughter is not going to finish education—she is doing her A-levels at the moment. She has been educated entirely pointlessly. I wish her the best for her exams, but she is learning Edwardian, post-industrial service industry skills that are totally inappropriate for the future. She is not going to do the same job for 30 years; in the next two years, or even tomorrow—we are hearing how the disintermediation is happening already—she will do something completely different that we have not even imagined. She is not going to buy a house in the same way, her mobility will be different, she probably will not retire, and anyone born after 2005 might not die.

We are looking today at a government system that is entirely outdated, not just by a tweak—not just issues over energy or employment policy, or the disastrous consequences of poor Tory government or, worse, Labour government. We are looking at an entire societal change that we are simply not prepared for or thinking about. This is a crisis and emergency, not in terms of how we control AI but how we teach our citizens and educate ourselves to cope with an age of purposelessness, which is far more fundamental.

That is why this debate from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury is so fascinating. In fact, this is a wonderful thing, because we will be allowed to be more human. We go back to the ancient traditions of rhetoric, where we have grammar, logic and articulation. We have to learn information, but then we have to have the dialectic: we have to learn truth, which is what puzzles us—what is true in the information age?—and then, of course, how we articulate it to have voice. We can be more human.

I am excited for the Church of England. You can dust off all those pews. Those empty churches will be filled, because we will have so much time to actually have societal relationships, to think about how we work in our communities, to be who we want to be; we will not have to do those functions that took over our lives for the whole of the history of humanity.

So I ask the Government to be brave and bold about a vision. How will we deal with societies where you do not have the common purpose of the services sector, and where machines take the drudgery away from us? How do we teach ourselves to deal with these new luxuries? Without that debate, we will have a serious crisis, but if we master it, this country can take a lead in the AI revolution.