Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent)

I thank the witnesses. I used to work with Older and Bolder, an alliance of age organisations. What I found then was the incredibly clear-eyed analysis.

We hear a lot about digitalisation and not leaving people behind. However, what we are hearing today is how can we make digitalisation catch up with the concerns, issues and needs. It has been described as really meaningful innovation. The European Union and Ireland and others leading on innovation are making that technology better and work better and holding it to those standards. That is not a thing that lags and I think that is really important. We have a lot of narrative about the deregulation and the idea that it speeds innovation. I believe that regulation drives better innovation. We saw that on data protection in the past as well and we see it here.

I want to address a couple of the areas that were mentioned because they are really key, such as clarity around regulation. The Data Protection Act 2018 was mentioned and there was disappointment with some of the AI Act in that it gave a stronger self-interpretational piece to industry than maybe for example the Data Protection Act 2018, which was very rights-centered. I stress the importance of continuing to apply our equality legislation and the Data Protection Act 2018 and folding those into the regulatory approach we take and not allowing the AI Act to set a limit on our ambition and regulation. I ask the witnesses to comment on that. The question of whether or not AI will make mistakes is crucial because it is not something we hear enough acknowledgement of, even from industry people. Also, AI will misrepresent and can be set to agendas by its owners. These are facts too. When we look at, for example, citizen information services, these were largely volunteer-run by older people with the core principle of people having access to accurate information. Is there a danger of that kind of access to accurate information through things like citizens information services getting swamped by AI information which may or may not be accurate?

I refer to the consent thing and the idea that we are the product if not. It is not just the clarity on consent but also the piece about whether there should be things which people should not be asked to consent to because they should not be allowed. Again, this is under data protection. There are certain areas which are legislatively prohibited, rather than consent allowed, because the power imbalance is said to be off. In those circumstances where the power imbalance is off, should there be certain things which we know people will feel they have to consent to and which, as such, should not be in it? That comes on to ongoing consent. I ask the witnesses to comment on explainable AI and the idea that people do not just sign up at the beginning but, rather, that on an ongoing basis they should have clarity on why they are being shown something or asked something, in the context of public services as well as private actors.

Similarly, there should be the right to appeal to a human decision-maker when a person feels that a decision has been made using AI . On the point about clarity, how important is it that people are always told where an automated decision or an AI or an artificial chatbot or whatever else is used? Sorry, that is a lot of questions.