Dr. Ciarán Seoighe:

There was a strong impact from Ireland on that. Many countries were looking at the interim report and one of the objections raised – and we were the only country out of 33 to raise any objections – was that we wanted to see fundamental human rights as part of any risk in any report that came forward and again, that would be driven by the expertise that comes in. However, we also need to look at what we do about these things. That is the other half of the equation. We know about these risks and these are things that are keeping us awake. Our main defence around biases, the risk to democracy, risk of deep fakes and scams is education and public discourse. We need to be talking about this and how people can know what to look for.

When it comes to the other stuff with big tech and their level of investment, there was talk at one point about a really interesting concept which was CERN for AI. As a small state we are not at the scale where we can invest the many millions required to be able to do this level of research and investment but if at a European level we had a large-scale centralised investment of which we could be part, then we would have the scale and power to do real research in the area and stay ahead of the curve. There are some mitigations and options related to each of these risks.