Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for their presentations. Ms O'Meara said that at national level we face a choice between seizing unprecedented opportunities and addressing the risks of these technologies. This is hopefully not so stark as having to choose between the two, although that is certainly where much of my anxiety arises about how we are going to manage this. Another concern regarding what was said is the fact that only 2% of companies have fully operationalised responsible AI. Companies deploying this have not taken on board what looks to be one of the critical ingredients. In addition, only 5% of organisations invest in reskilling. Against a background where we are all saying that this will be an unstoppable technology and that we would like to be leaders in the field, it looks like we are not starting from a good position in the context of our leading companies.

The second issue is to go into what becoming a leader in this technology might mean. It seems that cloud ecosystems, the capacity for computing and so on are at the heart of it. Is there a conflict between Ireland taking leadership here and our ambition to be sustainable? We hear daily that data centres are putting pressure on our energy capacity, but the corollary is that if we do not have data centres, we will not see continuing growth from an Irish base of these transformative companies. How do we resolve that issue?

I am also interested to hear about the disruption. When they talk about sectors that have been disrupted, journalism, law, programming and accounting come at the top. All of the witnesses are in the latter business, so that will presumably be hit. Is it just a question of those people adapting? I suspect that journalism is at the front end and is disintegrating to a degree. As a result of the impact of social media, traditional journalism is almost gone. It has not been a good reconciliation between the power of the technology and what most of us would like to see. I would like to hear the witnesses comments on that.

This brings me back to the issue of how we approach regulation. The EU has done a brave job. Compared with the wild west in the United States and social profiling in China, it is trying to create a framework where we are protected. Will we see the continuing concentration of innovation among a small number of extremely powerful companies, using technology that is so intimate in its influence it will be hard for regulators, other than through principle-based regulation, to keep up and to understand the codes being applied? We have all lived through financial crisis where there was principle-based regulation, so it needs to be more than that. I am interested in that.

The EU is talking about strategic autonomy now, in particular President Macron. As I understand it the EU has the regulation, but it has none of the platforms that are driving at the front end of this technology. Where does that leave Europe? Ought Europe be trying to create something more than just the regulatory model, and if so, how? They are not easy questions.