Professor Gregory O'Hare:

I will try to pick up on a few of the Deputy's comments. I concur with what was just said that the pace things are moving at is phenomenal, such that it has motivated Geoffrey Hinton, a very seasoned and established thought leader within Google, to resign. Many voices that members will have heard of, such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Geoffrey Hinton, are all calling for a global pause in AI. While Deputy O'Reilly referred to the legislative possibilities of effecting change within Ireland, with the utmost respect to Ireland or any individual country, we are talking about something that knows no boundaries. It knows no political, geographic or socioeconomic boundaries. This is something that demands, potentially, a global position. Ireland needs to find a way and a voice into that global discussion. That voice is a potentially significant one, given Ireland's fortunate position of playing host to significant tech companies. That is the first thing. Many people are advocating for a pause and these people are informed.

On some of the other points made, particularly the reference in the OECD report to the proportion of males adopting and routinely using AI seeming to be somewhat higher than that for females, I also noted that whenever I trudged through the many pages of the OECD report. However, I do not believe that to be a consequence of AI per sebut, rather, an artefact of the unfortunate gender imbalance among IT workers globally. That is very manifest within Ireland and around the world. That is just a natural consequence of that.

On wages, there is certainly an opportunity for employers to reduce salaries. Whether that opportunity is ever exercised will remain to be seen, but certainly many of the skill sets - I am looking to my colleague in the legal profession, Mr. Lupton - and many routine legal actions could be automated and significantly supported. White-collar professions that were often the bastion of never being impacted by technological roll-outs are now finding themselves in the front line. In some sense, some people might regard that as a refreshing change because all the previous incarnations of technological evolutions have impacted blue-collar workers. There is at least the opportunity to reduce salaries. However, new generations of jobs will manifest themselves. If you look at any of the fundamental technological revolutions that have occurred in our history, almost unanticipated roles have emerged, which have often been highly skilled and incredibly well paid. It is a bit of a balance in that regard.

On the point around disability and the possibility of this technology assisting those who are less fortunate, without question, that is a possibility. It is very important we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. This technology has profound opportunities. One of the issues I draw members' attention to is that the recent ChatGPT and OpenAI offerings have been provided out into the wild. No intellectual property, IP, is being protected. They have been offered up. In one sense, one could derive solace and reassurance from that because they are not being protected by one international IT company that will have this preferential position and could potentially hold the world to ransom. This technology is being put out into the wild. It is open source and you and I can use it. In fact, I recently toyed with ChatGPT and asked it to give me a short discourse on how I would recognise content produced by ChatGPT. I got a very interesting response. I had rather mischievously thought of producing my opening statement through ChatGPT but I thought that was too predictable and somewhat crass.