Professor Deirdre Ahern:

I think it was very well intended to put a human-centric approach. Things that affect us most might be things like, for example, people using AI to filter hundreds of job applications. That is right. That would now be considered high risk and looked at. There are cases where an AI system was only short-listing men for an IT position, on the basis of machine learning of the past. It is important we have the controls in there. It is fair to say that we need to remember, like the Deputy said, there can be a digital divide and we have to think of our society as a whole. I know that came up in the committee's first session. It strikes me that I was at an interesting conference and I was talking to the chair of ALONE, and he said how wonderful AI is and they use it to detect whether someone will slip or fall, and it can send alerts through. They are finding it is freeing up time for humans to spend more time talking to the older people and spend less time on administrative tasks. Even those alerts make people have more chance to be independent at home. There is a lot of opportunity. I think we have got it right but there will always be room to calibrate. We also have our own legal system here. We have a Constitution, equality laws and data privacy laws that come into play as well. There is much to see but I am hopeful we are going to in the right direction and that we have strong regulators here in courts.