David Stanton (Cork East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I noted what Professor O'Hare said earlier concerning the statement made by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and others that "AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity". I also note that he mentioned that the Google scientist, Blake Lemoine, resigned because he more or less said AI systems were heading towards becoming sentient, which would mean they could make decisions on their own. If we are talking, therefore, about a potential global supercomputer, all interconnected, and gathering vast amounts of data and intelligence and then making decisions based on that data on its own and having the power to do things, as Deputy Bruton said, including perhaps weaponising things, then we are talking about a whole different level altogether. As he also said, this process is moving so fast now. We know how slow the process is to put through any kind of legislation through Houses like this, never mind at a European level.

The advantage of a regulator is that he or she can move much faster to keep up with stuff. Thinking about the setting up of a gambling regulator, on which I did a great deal of work and which is on the way to being established here at last, such an officeholder can sit down with representatives of the industry and, as the industry adapts, the regulator can adapt, monitor and regulate in this regard. I note the UK has ruled out having a dedicated regulator for AI systems. I have two questions. To Professor O'Hare, first, where is this development going? Was the Google scientist who resigned right? Should we be this concerned? To Mr. Lupton, are we heading for a European-type regulator or perhaps national regulators? As was said earlier, we have so many of these high-tech companies based here that we will probably have a major responsibility in this space.

It seems to me that in this committee we are talking about work, industry and business, and this all overlaps, but this development has almost gone way beyond that context in many ways. I note as well that we talked about breakthroughs in breast cancer treatment recently which were, fundamentally, underpinned by AI. It can do super-calculations on a massive scale and come up with breakthroughs such as these. As we discussed earlier, this is only beginning to happen in science and medicine.

I have also read that AI is key to the EU's digital transformation and yet the Union is behind in this area. We have these two conflicting things happening. We must, first, progress the digital transformation and not be left behind globally and, second, we must ensure AI systems do not take over, literally. I am almost back into the realm of science fiction now but science fiction is rapidly becoming science fact. These are the three issues I would like the witnesses to address.