Dr. Dermot Coates:

I will have to come back to the Deputy on that but, speaking from memory, my understanding is at the time that these were initially framed and even following on from what were the millennium development goals, there is a long continuum here, it strikes me that the focus was not on AI. This comes back to Deputy O'Reilly's point earlier about fast-moving social media transformation. The technology is moving at such a pace that even three to five years ago, I am not entirely sure that when these goals or other policies or strategies were being framed, we were taking into account even in the medium term what some of these technological advancements were going to mean. In the goals we talk about political stability, decent work and open trade but we know now that some of these transformations such as AI are going to have real impacts on some of these sectors in terms of jobs, stability and communications. It is certainly something that the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council dedicated quite a bit of space to in its most recent annual report, flagging the apparent opening of that gap between public policy and the recognition of what these changes mean. I have no technical expertise and cannot even work the remote control at home but my understanding is we talk now about AI based on traditional computing models. Very soon we will get to a point where AI will run on quantum computing. That is a great leap. It is incumbent on us to put in place that type of policy and the frameworks and all of the regulations that go around that to do what can be done to keep pace. I may well have missed something in terms of a given sustainable development goal or sub-team that refers to these type of changes and if that is the case, we will certainly revert to the clerk to the committee afterwards. That is simply my general sense of how quickly things are moving.