Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Human Relationships and Society

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts

Friday 5th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill (Con)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, I congratulate the most reverend Primate on this very timely debate and her powerful speech, which will repay reading carefully. I also am delighted to follow the former leader of the Mendip District Council, who at least knows where North Hill is, and I agree with almost every word of his speech as well.

I am going to be accused, no doubt, by some of my colleagues—perhaps even one or two sitting on my right—of crying wolf, because I too am going to call for regulation. But I remind noble Lords that at the end of the fairy tale there is a real wolf. As recursive self-improvement arrives—it may have already arrived—and machines can design machines more intelligent than themselves without our intervention and our control, we are in a completely new world, pace President Milei of Argentina in the Financial Times yesterday. As my late friend Jim Lovelock, he of the Gaia hypothesis, used to say at the end of his long life, “Of course machines are the next stage in evolution. But it’ll be all right: they’ll keep some of us in a zoo for sentimental reasons”. I am not entirely sure I want my grandchildren to live in a zoo.

As the Pope points out, this industrial revolution, unlike the nuclear revolution, is different. It is more like the first one, because the origins of it all come in the private sector, and the Governments are trailing along behind. Among those founders, there are very good people. I happen to believe, like the noble Lord who has just spoken, that in Demis Hassabis we have not only a near genius but a man with a strong moral compass. The work that he and John Jumper did to solve the protein folding problem with AlphaFold is of huge benefit to medicine.

But then there is a potential wolf. Have a look at Evo 2, also a triumph of huge potential, trained on, I believe, 9 trillion nucleotides. It can read the entire blueprint of life. It is in open source. It has guardrails in it, but there are those who say those guardrails can already be got around, for those who want to seek to weaponise bioweapons. We need the humanities to remind us of the possibilities. The most reverend Primate referred to CS Lewis—have a look again at That Hideous Strength of 1945. Have a look at a rather different sort of writer, Gore Vidal, who imagined in Kalki a mad religious purifier wanting to purify the world of sin with a bioweapon. He wrote that in 1978. We need our humanities departments to help us think about the issues here and not leave it to the techies, wonderful though many of them are. Our humanities departments in universities are under very great pressure at the moment. We need philosophers; we need people like Iain McGilchrist reminding us of the left brain/right brain division. We need the Pope, and we need the right reverend Primate, to remind us of humanity.

We need to move fast. A recent study by Barclays Bank predicts that between 70% and 90% of the jobs in installation and repair, manufacturing, construction and warehousing may be taken by humanoid robots—they will be humanoid, because the world is built by us to fit humans—and that will happen over the next 10 to 15 years. So 70% to 90% of those jobs may be gone.

We in this country, thanks partly to the patriotism of Demis Hassabis, Geoffrey Hinton and others, are players in this world. We have a constellation of start-ups and of people thinking about these issues, which makes us among the principal three in the world—far behind America and China, but significant. Thanks to the former Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, we are in a good position in relation to regulation, because our AISI is widely regarded as among the best of its kind in the world. So yes, we must encourage our start-ups and, yes, we must find wider pools of capital to support them, as the Government are trying to do, to be fair to them. Yes, we must think of regulation.

My final, and short, point is this. We must not be nationalistic about this technology. We made that terrible mistake with nuclear. A predecessor of mine as Minister of Science, much more distinguished than me, who subsequently sat on the Woolsack, said that it was near treason to select the PWR reactor rather than the AGR reactor, because the first was American and the second was all British. Poppycock. We should buy what is best. We should make the public sector an intelligent and careful buyer, but we should not fail to buy the best, from wherever it is produced.