Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach Gníomhach agus fearaim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. We welcome tonight's motion from the Fianna Fáil Parliamentary Party and, in particular, the calls for a national awareness campaign and the need for more work to be done in the area of AI. Sinn Féin also welcomes the recent Government decision to establish an artificial intelligence advisory council. That is something Sinn Féin has been calling for since earlier this year.

With regard to the AI intelligence council, it needs to deliver a dual mandate of ensuring that we harness the positive powers of AI but, at the same time, protect workers and society from the negative aspects of the technology. It is disappointing that the motion does not have a focus on workers. Greater focus should certainly have been given to the impact that advancements in AI will have on workers, specifically, because it was a key focus of the discussions at the Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment.

We know that AI can be a profoundly disruptive technology and can also be accompanied by a great deal of technological anxiety. There is a need for a specific focus on the technological surveillance of workers using artificial intelligence and machine learning and it is essential that the advisory council would include workers' representatives from the trade union movement.

The motion is also disappointing in that it does not address the impact AI and emerging technologies are having on the environment and I would like to focus the remainder of my remarks as the climate justice spokesperson particularly around the toll that AI is taking. This is particularly the case with regard to the exponential growth of data centres. These are colossal facilities, often unseen but omnipresent, and they are voraciously consuming electricity and, therefore, fossil fuels, at an alarming rate.

As we witness the strides in AI, where it is turning industries upside down, we have to acknowledge that there are environmental consequences to this. The energy demands of data centres, as I said, are insatiable. The training of the AI models, particularly those deep-learning models, is computationally intensive. It requires significant computational power and those computers then give rise to excessive heat. Their data centres then require extensive cooling systems to manage the heat generated by the high performance computing, and all of that is adding to their overall environmental impact.

It is interesting that there was an academic paper which was published only a month ago which found that Google's AI alone could consume as much electricity as a country the size of Ireland. Some 29.3 TW per hour is required, and that is just Google's AI, which is a significant increase when compared to Google's historical AI-related energy consumption.

We need to pay attention to the expansion of data centres, to the escalating demand for electricity they have, and to what they are actually doing. We agree with regard to data centres, that moving to remote working and to the digital economy is absolutely essential. Equally, there are elements of AI which will be very beneficial to society. We also have to accept, however, that there are elements of AI which are not beneficial and we need to have greater oversight as to which we want, and as to how much renewable energy we are going to dedicate to facilitating this demand. That is because we cannot just have exponential growth of renewable energy in this country. Yes, we have an untapped resource but we cannot just keep building more and more data centres, and more and more computers for AI, and putting that demand on our renewable energy.

One of the most insidious practices from an energy usage and AI perspective is called real-time bidding, RTB. When you land on a webpage, there is a complex quick and energy consuming option which happens to determine what ad an individual will see. It is gathering information on individuals, about their likes and dislikes, their interests, their vulnerabilities, and even their moods, to then sell their attention to the highest bidder. It was the Irish Council for Civil Liberties that helped to uncover the scale of this practice. The machinery behind the system has a rapacious appetite for energy. Some178 trillion RTB transactions each year in the US and in Europe alone are processed through data centres which use an estimated 200 TW hours of energy each year, which is more than the entire national energy consumption of a medium-sized country. As I said, we accept that AI is with us. It has been with us for a very long time. It has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. We have to have a conversation about what AI is essential and what AI is not essential and about the point at which we say "Stop" to the energy demand of data centres in this country. If we are just to allow exponential growth of AI and data centres, the Government can tell everybody living in rural Ireland where all the renewable energy will come from, whether it is their coastal communities or on land.