Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for securing this debate and for the way she has just introduced it. Alongside the Pope’s recent encyclical, moral leadership in this issue is vital.

I should declare my interest in Century-Tech, Goodnotes and the Good Future Foundation, and as a member of your Lordships’ Communications and Digital Committee. I should also confess that I have two main collaborators. Both are called Claude: one is my wonderful wife, and the other is an AI product from Anthropic. Both are great sounding boards. One is brilliant at advising me, looking after me and bring me joy. The other helped me summarise the philosophical positions on relationships that inform my contribution to this debate.

The genius of the likes of Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis have combined computer science and neuroscience to create machines that out-compete what Aristotle described as the essence of being human—the rational animal—with AI machines that learn, make choices and simulate friendship and intimacy. Yesterday’s Guardian carried an interview with Joanna Stern, who spent a year inviting AI to do nearly everything for her. Her encounter with a companion AI was most striking. What scared her, she said, was

“putting … your emotions in the hands of the machines”.

She came home and hugged her children, saying she never wanted them to have

“a relationship with a chatbot”.

That is already the reality for many. Male Allies UK surveyed 1,000 boys aged 12 to 16 and found that 26% preferred the attention of an AI companion to real human connection. We must act urgently to prevent this consigning a generation to fester in their bedrooms, spiralling into mental health crisis as their addiction to phones gets deeper and darker.

AI has no ethics, none of Heidegger’s mortality or self-awareness. We must listen to Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, who yesterday called for “a brake” on AI. There is a real risk of superintelligent AI systems being developed that could act autonomously from human control, learn their own language to collaborate with each other and present an existential threat to our species. Big tech and AI are already accelerating a breakdown of trust and a rise of division. The attention economy pulls us into echo chambers and away from human-edited media. It is simple to create fake content and distort truth. It is now easy for foreign actors, hackers and shameless populists to spark outrage, then protests and violence, as seen this week. We must make it as easy to be pro-social with these tools as it is to be anti-social. We must do something about addiction by design.

Then, there is education and work. The Milburn review is a wake-up call: there are 1 million NEETs, 7% of 14 to 16 year-olds are unfit for work, and there is a growing mental health crisis among the young. Our obsession with testing in schools is creating a system that alienates too many people, training them to absorb content and produce predicted answers, much as we train AI models, and which AI does better. Young people know that, and they are losing hope as they lose their place in the labour market, whether or not they passed their tests.

AI can help teachers and release them to focus on the human-to-human aspect of their endeavour. But curriculum, pedagogy and assessment must change to nurture empathy, judgment and care for oneself, for others and for the planet. We do not yet know the impact of AI on work, but we know that work is really important for giving people routine, purpose and positivity as social animals. However, we can predict that intelligent robots and software will take over more screen-based work, and more production and service delivery. I suspect that we now need people who can thrive in a relational economy. We will value the personal when we are buying. We already crave authenticity, live performance, the kitchen table at the restaurant for those who can afford it, and the bespoke service or product. That is where the future lies. Future work will not be so much in data centres or in software development; it will be in human contact, unique service and quirky creation. We need an education system that stops standardising humans and nurtures individuals capable of love, empathy and judgment, who can craft, create and communicate. Then, our society will be resilient to the threat of AI and grasp its extraordinary opportunities.

I make a final comment: all this needs the Government and Parliament to have backbone and regulate AI. There may be some who are worried about what that means for a US trade deal. My advice to Ministers is to put the future of our society, our cohesion and our children first.