Sinéad Gibney (Dublin Rathdown, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate Deputy Smyth on her role, as she said at the beginning of today's discussion, as the first Minister of State with intleacht shaorga in her title.

I welcome today's discussion. This is such an important topic in society right now. It will dominate our term of office for the next five years. There is no question that it will be an important part of so many areas of life and it is important we facilitate this type of discussion.

I would question the framing of it because even the order the discussion is going in in terms of how technology or AI is specifically used for the public good, in business, the economy and for wider society is demonstrative of what we, unfortunately, have seen in policymaking in this area, which is an emphasis on industry, business, economy and a failure to take into account the wider implications of AI in society.

I am excited about artificial intelligence. I am a techie. I worked in the tech sector for eight years. I am a technophile but my excitement about AI is tempered right now because we are not keeping up. The politics and the legal framework we need to harness AI for good does not exist and the actors with all the power right now are big business. I cannot be excited. I cannot be positive about the impact of AI until I am secure in that regulatory framework, until I feel that the right safeguards and the right controls are in place for us to use AI without the dangers it presents.

Dúirt an Taoiseach inné go raibh rogha idir dul i ngleic le hathrú aeráide agus poist a chosaint. Is drochshampla é sin. Ní rogha idir ceann amháin nó ceann eile í. Níl poist á gcosaint againn trí easpa rialacháin. The Taoiseach, yesterday, positioned it as a choice between regulation and protection of jobs, which is problematic. That is not how we need to think about it. We have to introduce regulations, not in a way to prevent jobs or job creation but in a way to protect against the precarity we will see otherwise.

Again, it speaks to that imbalance between industry and societal interests.

I will speak briefly about regulation before I talk about some of those challenges that really keep me awake at night. We have regulation at domestic and EU level. We have started to see the legislating of this space in terms of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act and the Digital Services Act. Both of those are good steps but nowhere near where we need to be. Similar to the legislation we have seen in the EU with the Digital Services Act and the AI Act, both were watered down to a point where I believe that, once again, we are seeing this industry emphasis and not the impact we know AI will have on society. In a parliamentary question response I received this week I discovered it seems we will be opting out of the section in the AI Act on law enforcement's use of AI. I would love to hear more about whether that is the case.

We have heard that displacement of labour is one of the big challenges. I find it interesting that the last Government speaker agreed with what the Taoiseach said yesterday that AI will bring about the fourth industrial revolution. We will see labour displacement at a rate we have not seen in generations and yet he said that robots will not take our jobs. Robots will take our jobs. Any jobs that are text-based, such as middle class professions like solicitors, journalists and so on, will be impacted as generative AI develops over the coming five, ten or 20 years. There is no question about that. We have to deal with that head on. We have to deal with it in the most positive way we can by saying that these efficiencies actually should allow us more time as a society for leisure. We should look at really big societal questions such as the identity we have with labour. We should look at a reduction of working time, for example, working towards four-day weeks. We should look at universal basic income and tools that will allow that safety net for us to transition because otherwise we will see a continued erosion and precarity of labour because of the displacement we are experiencing from this.

The next thing I want to call out is algorithmic decision-making. Another Government speaker spoke about this issue but I have huge problems with it. We have seen cases emerge in both the UK and the Netherlands where algorithmic decision-making is used in the provision of public services and it leads to bias and discrimination. We know this. We know the tools are not there yet to deal with this efficiently. It also removes access to justice for people because if there is no human behind the decision being made it is very difficult for people who feel they have been wrongly decided against to find accountability for those decisions. Those safeguards are not there and the structures are not in place to actually deploy this in a way I believe is yet safe.

Disinformation, misinformation and malinformation are huge threats to our democracy, rule of law and political stability as a country and as a globe. We all know this as elected representatives. We all have experienced some of this. It will only worsen with deepfakes becoming more and more sophisticated and we have to be really live to it. Underlying all of this is digital literacy. As I mentioned earlier, I am a techie. I love using technology but I do not love surveillance so I make sure I deploy my technology in a way that I am not surveilled. Most people do not have that level of sophistication so digital literacy has to keep up as we rely on AI.

I will touch briefly on some of the recommendations the Social Democrats set out in our general election manifesto. I would be delighted to speak to the Minister of State about these in more detail as she gets going on her brief. An AI committee must be established to deal with this because it is such a cross-Government issue. There needs to be more honest conversation about labour displacement plans and really thinking about the massive scale of retraining that will be required. Ireland needs to play into its unique position where most tech giants are headquartered here; we need to have honest conversations about them as publishers and about their use of AI and technology more broadly to drive polarisation in society.

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