Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Baroness Uddin Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Uddin (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for helpfully reminding us of the centrality of human values and dignity in all aspects of our work in this place. I am delighted to follow the noble Lords, Lord Rook and Lord Raval, and the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman. I hope that my perspectives complement some of what has already been said.

I wish to begin with a conversation I had with a young person from east London, a bright and curious 15 year-old, who told me that her best friend was an AI chatbot—not her best online friend but her best friend. This is a cautionary note about technology in our pocket, and a generation growing up in an age of infinite online screen connection and profound disconnection from a mundane and ordinary experience of childhood.

His Holiness Pope Leo’s remarkable intervention is no surprise to me, having had the honour of meeting him in Rome when he spoke of our collective, shared responsibilities for a just world. His Holiness echoed millions of concerned citizens on the challenges before us and issued a profound warning for artificial intelligence

“to be ‘disarmed,’ freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion or death”,

with long-term injury to humanity.

During the passage of the then Online Safety Bill, we reviewed the depraved abuse of children online, with its simulation of human emotions, voices and faces. Most recently, we have had the degradation of women through apps, which tests the tolerance threshold of even a hardened child protection worker like myself. However, when it steps into creative online relationships, aiming to comfort those who are vulnerable, it surely encroaches on a distinct red line and becomes an existential threat to safeguarding our societies. Yet we have arrived here too. As a Muslim woman, I have spent a lifetime in communities where human relationship is not incidental to faith but central to it, and where the care for the neighbour, dignity of the stranger, protection of the child and support for the grieving are not social policy objectives, but absolute obligations. AI cannot and will not reach this depth.

I also fear the infinite possibilities of expanding the perpetual stereotypes of women. Indeed, AI profiling of Black and Asian men in the criminal justice system continues to replicate centuries-old bias. The algorithms focus on the likes of my sons and grandsons in terms of security threats to our nation, determining who receives a job interview, who is flagged at the border, who is channelled to Prevent programmes, who is denied a mortgage and who is stopped in the street by the police. These are daily risks overlooked by the humans who design and create algorithms.

As for our children, our advocate, guru and noble friend Lady Kidron has spoken for us all. An entire generation is being groomed, emotionally, socially and morally by systems built to entice their attention and addictions. Algorithms know no Sabbath, no bedtime and no compassion or mercy. We are outsourcing childhood to the market and calling it innovation. This House should not tolerate or be comfortable with that. To add to the woes of our young people, the automation of work potentially leaves millions in an AI-induced metaverse and online paradise. Experts and Members of this House are saying that it is a wake-up call for our governing institutions. As for workplaces, unions fighting the bosses for fair wages and conditions will be off the chart when the gatekeepers will be a new juggernaut of machinery.

I do not oppose artificial intelligence; the benefits are infinitely stated. Technology can infinitely benefit aspects of healthcare and medicine, and assistive technology for people with a range of intellectual and physical challenges. The iPad is a wondrous upgrade to old computing, but technology in the hands of profiteers without conscience is an imminent danger. It fast diminishes opportunities for the next generation and is no progress at all.

Can the Minister say, when our Government speak confidently of AI opportunities, what training, resources and criteria will be applied to equalise the imbalances that are already present in the workforce? We speak of AI safety, but do we have our own sovereign infrastructure ready to deliver the technology revolution that is upon us and designed to engulf our data and privacy? If not, what safeguards are in place to protect us from the handful of monopolies based outside our jurisdiction?

Surely it is time to be comprehensive about AI. We should take into account the combination of emerging technology, including the incoming quantum, and how we can strangulate—sorry, regulate—our chatbots for safety; and, in navigating its use, adhere to the sovereignty, security and safety within the governance of our economy and finance, for the well-being of our children’s and citizens’ rights. The most reverend Primate has done this House a profound service in asking us to challenge the inevitability of this and to consider how to legislate, as we put oversight in place to eliminate the harms of the momentous onslaught of this incoming risk to humanity and human society. I believe we can.