AI is in the process of redefining our reality, how we live, work, date, shop, even influencing at a deeper level, how we think about ourselves and our communities. Yet we often talk about AI in the abstract. There isn’t a shortage of AI commentary, from online hot-takes, academic research, down to industrialised misinformation. But we are missing the broad, structured leadership our people need and deserve.
We haven’t taken our communities on a journey with AI. People don’t understand it, its impacts, or how we can make it work for us. And why should they, when so many of us in positions of power don’t either?
The window of opportunity for political action, accountability and transparency is closing. The Pope’s Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, calls for action from world leaders, delivered at a global inflexion point where we could rewrite our social contract together. The Encyclical is not a neo-Luddite manifesto, but a call to action in a world struggling to find its new centre of gravity.
The British state has done more than many to curate a vibrant UK AI ecosystem, but while this is foundational, a compelling vision about the AI future we want has yet to reach the public in a meaningful way.
This is not just a British problem. AI strategies globally feel universally managerial, cautiously hinting at vision. 2026 has seen significant announcements by the British and Canadian governments to take further steps towards a vision, putting sovereignty and trust firmly on the agenda. But across the globe, there’s a poverty of citizen engagement, a lack of democratic oversight and an absence of agreed principles.
This AI industrial revolution should enable a renewal in our shared humanity. If we are rolling the pitch for trans-national Big-Tech, the least we should be expecting is democratic accountability and a consequential say in how AI is governed.
For too long, politicians and other leaders have passed the buck on AI. ‘I’m not a techie’ is too often used as an excuse for heads-in-the-sand. Well, the pitch was left open, and our collective realities are being redefined, largely without us or our communities.
I am no AI-doomer. Before Parliament, I was Head of Policy at BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, an organisation rooted in a Royal Charter to promote standards and ethics in tech for the common good. The people I met there helped hone my conviction in the virtuous potential of technology, and wider British civil society has been championing ethical AI for a generation now.
Many AI applications are stunningly virtuous. AlphaFold has accelerated research in biology and medicine to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s beyond what many dreamed possible. This humanitarian ‘giant leap’ will save and improve millions of lives.
Globally, the gradual but determined replacement of jobs with AI tools and the development of ever more effective and lethal AI-enabled weapons and surveillance systems pose real ethical, moral and practical questions.
For individuals, hyper-personalised social media echo chambers push millions to the brink of radicalisation, and AI-enabled, obsessive self-optimisation tools present huge challenges for mental health and physical wellbeing.
In this context, Magnifica Humanitas is the message we need, at the time we need it. It lays bare by how far some foundational principles of humanity and ethics have been eroded without consent and without an adequate collective response.
As we understandably rush to stay afloat in the global AI scramble, principles like ‘human welfare coming before efficiency and technology’, and ‘work has innate value’, no longer seem to be as firm as they once were.
The ‘how’ matters. How is the dignity of work being preserved and enhanced as AI is implemented? We must implement AI; there is no realistic pause, but work and well-being must be preserved, and the state cannot, and should not be left to mitigate with ever-decreasing resources.
In the past, technological leaps, like the advances in nuclear power or the internet, have been overseen by nation-states, with at least some democratic oversight. Up to now, AI has manifested almost entirely private and trans-national, with a small number of private companies controlling the foundational models, data and compute power. The rules of a new social contract for billions are being decided by internal algorithms beyond public scrutiny, and without conscious public participation or consent.
Part of this is the failure of leaders to understand even the basics of AI and frontier technologies. While organisations like the UN and the Council of Europe have been pushing in similar directions to the Holy Father on AI, all are currently toothless in comparison to the scale and sophistication of the transnational technology companies that have already set the agenda.
We are not short of policymakers in the UK. Across the UK, we have 650 Members of Parliament, 836 Peers in the House of Lords, 96 members of the Senedd, 90 Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament and 19,000 councillors. We are blessed with some of the world’s most awesome thinkers, researchers and independent AI institutions.
Up to now, we have, in large part, outsourced our conscience and critical analysis to others, but it is our moral and civic duty to upskill and engage our political action. The Pope’s intervention is a clear and pointed call for us, regardless of faith, to engage our agency, and lead.
Dan Aldridge is the Labour MP for Weston-super-Mare
(Image: ChatGPT)
