Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is no doubt that AI is developing at a rapid pace and the technology has the potential to change the way we live, engage with each other, work and play. AI will affect different facets of our lives and has the potential to bring a number of benefits. I have seen programmes about how AI has improved the speed of the development of new medicines saving lives and costing less in development. Other areas include life-saving technology such as vehicle and airline safety. AI is found in most of our electrical household items. People are using AI in so many positive ways. Students, teachers, academics and even we as public representatives are using it on a regular basis outside the technology we have in Leinster House. No, I did not use it to write this speech. I did it myself through old-fashioned research.

In business, the list of opportunities for AI will be endless. Its use in shops, manufacturing, sales, insurance, finance and law is happening as we speak. Like all developing technology, it also poses a number of risks. We simply do not know all the risks at this stage, however, we can be fairly sure that jobs that are here now will be gone. They will be consigned to the history books like those of the coopers about whom we now sing who used to work in Guinness and other breweries.

Their jobs have now been consigned to history. I am originally from the north inner city, an area that was destroyed by containerisation. Thousands of jobs were destroyed overnight. That led to decades of mass unemployment, poverty and deprivation, and into the heroin epidemic of the 1980s. These are the things we have to consider and we must be careful when we look at technology like this.

In recent years, there has been a movement to address AI through various policy initiatives and regulation in different jurisdictions, including in Ireland. Significantly, there has been an important move towards regulating AI within the European Union in the form of the EU AI Act, which entered into force on 1 August 2024. The precise impact of this Act on AI in Ireland remains to be seen but, as a binding regulation, the EU AI Act will have important implications for Ireland as it will shape our country's approach to AI in the future.

I today came across the following three questions that I think are important. How can we massively develop artificial intelligence technologies and uses across the world? How can we ensure nobody is left behind and preserve freedoms in the AI revolution? How can we ensure that uses of artificial intelligence respect our humanist values and the technology serves society and the public interest? The simplest and soundest answer I came up with was regulation, regulation, regulation.

Professor Gregory O'Hare is a professor of AI and the head of the school of computer science and statistics in Trinity College Dublin, TCD. He has acknowledged the difficulty of legislating for such a vast evolving area. He said at a meeting of the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment:

I do not think the legislative framework we have at the moment is in a position to be able to respond with the speed that we need. Things are starting to present themselves that have not previously been considered because they did not need to be considered.

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It is difficult to legislate for something that is so difficult to even define. We need to move rapidly. Even the speed at which we are moving at a European level is not sufficient. The boundaries around this technology are not governed by political or geographic barriers.

In an interview with The Irish Timesin February last year, Dr. Patricia Scanlon said:

We all admit how powerful this technology is and anything that powerful needs to be regulated. I think anybody arguing against that doesn't really have very strong legs to stand on because the "it's for the benefit of society" argument and that "trust us" attitude didn't really work very well with social media.

We all know the positives of social media, which include the connections that people make. However, we also know the dangers of social media and the harm it is causing, particularly to the mental health of our younger generation.

I will touch on the impact on the environment, as Deputy Ó Laoghaire mentioned. The processing of data is very resource-intensive. I will give the House two statistics. Each MWh of energy requires the consumption of 7,100 l of water. A simple request for a 100-word email generated by an AI chatbot using GPT-4 requires 0.14 kWh of electricity. That is equal to the electricity required to light 14 LED lightbulbs for one hour. That is for a 100-word email.

AI is important. It is coming; in fact, it is here. It is something we need to regulate. We must look after our society.

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