Mr. Kevin Marshall:

I am grateful for the opportunity to make an opening statement to the committee. We have made a written submission in response to the questions we were asked to address so I will simply go through the main points.

It is now commonplace to say that we live in a time of unprecedented technological change. The pace of advancement is greater than any time in human history. However, there are lessons from history that we can learn when thinking about how we develop an integrated strategy to move forward to develop skills across the board for all out citizens. This is not something new. The notion of technological unemployment was highlighted by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s. He wrote about examples from the past of workers being displaced by new technologies such as water wheels, windmills, mechanical clocks, steam engines and so on.

There is now a growing movement within the technology area that is interested in the notion of artificial intelligence and how it is going to impact our lives now and into the future. A recent study by McKinsey highlighted the fact that between 40% and 50% of the workforce is currently affected by artificial intelligence and that this will increase over the next five years. More worryingly, it has been suggested that as many as 800 million workers could be displaced by artificial intelligence by 2030. This is hugely significant in the context of policies on the education of all of our citizens. A number of frameworks exist, which are worth highlighting, particularly the work done by the European Commission on DigiComp 2.1, which outlines a number of skills, strategies and competencies that are worth considering in the context of policy going forward. Reference is made to information and data literacy, communication, collaboration and safety.

I was struck by what was said by previous contributors on the challenges in basic literacy, of which I was unaware, to be honest. That creates an even greater challenge for us because to access all this fantastic technology and the courses that are available, people need to be able to engage with the material. In that context, there is an even greater need for an integrated strategy.

Over the past couple of months, we have been working with An Cosán to develop the digital stepping stones programme, an interesting and enlightening project. We will continue to work with An Cosán to improve outcomes by providing infrastructure and a curriculum that we feel is relevant to upskilling individuals across the country. We have provided more details on this in our written submission and I am happy to engage with the committee to discuss these issues further.

The final point I would make is that we need to pay attention to this and to develop an integrated policy and an implementation strategy that deals with all of these issues.