Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Lord Raval Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Raval (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, commend the most reverend Primate on this debate. In 2017, when I was an outsider facilitating the College of Bishops, I found her to be a welcome voice of wisdom. She struck me even then as one to heed, and her remarks today show why.

I make one central argument: if we are serious about acting on your Lordships’ concerns about human relationships and the impact of AI, and vice versa, then as my noble friend Lord Brooke mentioned, the United Kingdom must have sovereign capability in AI. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Owen, that, for our values to carry weight, we must have the means to give them effect. It is an existential issue, not a choice.

Today, the most advanced chips are designed and made abroad. The cloud platforms that train the world’s models rest with a handful of American firms, as the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, reminded us, and the frontier models themselves with just two countries: the United States and China. As the severed cables in the Baltic Sea and the Red Sea showed, this infrastructure can be cut. A nation reliant entirely on systems owned and governed elsewhere has accepted a strategic vulnerability.

Echoing the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, I am not calling for technological isolationism. Britain should have multiple allies and partners. I pay tribute to my honourable friend in another place, the Minister for AI and Online Safety, who, in the face of having an impossible job, has the energy and fluency to advance this existential course. He understands that we have the advantage of world-class talent and the chance to put it to work.

We need to reverse the brain drain and forge the boldest partnerships. Britain is doing this through the AI opportunities roadmap and growth zones. We have the design and engineering skills. Partners such as India can help us to scale it. But our vision should not stop at infrastructure. Sovereign capability is the foundation that is, for me at least, just one of three further duties among many that I want to highlight.

The first is epistemic security. Dr Elizabeth Seger, who I saw in the Gallery earlier, is the author of a Demos report. She warns that our information systems are now critical national infrastructure, as essential as power or water. Saturated by synthetic media, the danger is no longer misinformation but the erosion of shared reality itself. We have seen how atrocities can be weaponised, a suspect’s faith or ethnicity seized upon, a falsehood amplified for profit and a whole community made to answer for the act of one. Whatever the target, the effect is the same: grief turned into division. Those charged with national security attest that a nation’s strength in a crisis—including a pandemic—rests not on infrastructure alone but on trust. A society divided against itself cannot defend itself. AI can unite a nation or divide it.

My second point is on accountability. In her book Prophecy, Oxford professor Carissa Véliz warns that as algorithms confer power—even surveillance over people—predictions of who qualifies for insurance, whom we date, who ends up in prison et cetera can be self-fulfilling. The Dutch childcare scandal, where automated scoring wrongly flagged thousands of families for fraud, showed the cost. Without sovereign means to govern these systems, we can drift into totalitarianism.

Relatedly, my last concern is about power. If algorithms not yet truly intelligent can already inflame hatred and create havoc, imagine what superintelligence might do in the hands of those who would have control rather than serve.

I ask the Minister, what are the Government doing to ensure that we are not adapting to a future built elsewhere but instead building one that we want? Will they support education and training at every level, including the formation of our civic, business and faith leaders, so that those who steward this future are properly equipped to do so?