Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)

This is very interesting. The witnesses are ringing alarm bells on a number of fronts in terms of the significant potential for AI to reflect and then amplify the biases and discrimination that already exist in our society and then make disabled people's lives worse. That is clearly posed as a possibility in what the witnesses have presented in terms of employment, discrimination, etc. There is a lot there for us to work on.

To start, I was struck by the points in terms of the Irish Deaf Society about the dangers. For example, it might start as being seen as great that we can have Irish Sign Language in children's programmes that maybe we otherwise would not have had.

That then becomes a slippery slope to the view that "Sure this is great and we will just get rid of ISL interpreters and use it everywhere". A picture is painted of potentially fatal implications for people; certainly life-changing implications in terms of the misuse of this in legal or medical contexts. One can imagine just how wrong this could go. There is a real warning for us. There is a really good series of principles to be respected. They seem very strong. There are policy recommendations to make that real. To what extent do the witnesses think those principles are currently being respected given the point Mr. Sherwin made about the pace of things? There is this race going on between different corporations. We are trying to define these principles and say they have to abide by them but things are moving on. To what extent are these principles currently being either respected or not respected?