Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 29 May 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation
Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Businesses: Discussion (Resumed)
Mr. Jeremy Rollison:
Yes, 100% and it includes exactly those impact assessment templates and the obligations for any engineering team, which is building that space.
Another one goes back to the establishment of our responsible AI committee in Microsoft. It was indeed for many of those escalations that might come up when questions are asked about a customer's request for us to design this or build that. Where can we have escalations all the way to the senior leadership level to say, "No", we are not going to do that, that is not one we are comfortable with and here is how we are going to mitigate that.
Finally, it has come up in the context of regulatory obligations but amidst that constellation, we have taken this red-teaming approach we have taken where we have colleagues, even third party colleagues, dedicated to essentially attacking our systems to find those vulnerabilities. Again, it is never perfect but it is more than just that three-pronged approach I mentioned.
On the education side, I defer to some of the remarks we made earlier. We hear a great deal from educators about the concerns of the younger generation who are sometimes more native to these applications but that does not replace any of the needs for the old school way of learning, for a lack of a better way of describing it. Those who will be best at using this technology are those who can harness it but if one is just relying on the AI to spit out an output, without checking the veracity or being aware of the inaccuracies that will come from that, I do not think one will be successful at all. Insofar as curricula need to be updated, it is more about how these tools can be used but not encouraging the idea that these are the only ways that one can do it. This comes back to the earlier sets of questions on education and what policymakers can do. There are some updates to curricula which are part of that but I do not think it in any way replaces the same sets of foundational skills we have talked about for decades.