Dr. Aideen Hartney:

I thank the Deputy. We have a concern that because at the moment the algorithms are based on the middle of the bell curve, AI is excluding anything it would conceive of as not normal. My colleagues are always telling me a story that I find horrifying. In the examples of a self-driving car, it ran over a disabled road user every single time because it did not see him or her as a road user. There would be some concerns, particularly in the employment context. Some of the issues around this are improving data collection as a whole so that the data sets that are fed into AI learning models are improved. At the moment, disability or equality data are not necessarily of the standards they should be. A national data equality strategy is supposed to be coming out soon and we hope it will take measures to address that issue. Some measures will be taken in that regard.

On the public sector side of things, there are guidelines for good and ethical use of AI in the public service at the moment. There is a useful canvas board where people can assess the impact on rights holders of the deployment of AI in a particular context. Our concern from our experience of the years is that there is sometimes a hierarchy in terms of equality grounds and disability can be forgotten or come towards the bottom of that hierarchy. We need the public sector staff to be aware of disability as an issue before they can properly account for those assessments. Those are some of the concerns.