A new forum involving the Government, employers and trade unions is to be established to explore the impact of AI on the workplace.
The Government’s Labour Employer Economic Forum (LEEF) will be convened to address concerns AI will wipe out many professions and make it harder for entry-level graduates to get jobs.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin announced the forum at the AI summit in Dublin’s RDS on Wednesday, part of the Irish presidency of the Council of the European Union.
He conceded some “work functions may not survive AI”, but other additional work functions will be created.
“We have seen this with technology before. There is an open book on that at the moment. We are certainly looking more at the opportunity side than the negative side.”
Martin said Ireland needed to embrace the possibilities of AI without “compromising on our core values”.
He delivered a robust defence, saying the technology would improve the delivery of public services, assist in health screening, improve customer service experience in the tax system and help with fire and flood forecasting.
He said there was an “open question in terms of displacement”, but it would not be happening in the public service.
“There will be a transformative impact, that could mean changing of roles, redeployment and assuming new roles within the public service. We are not necessarily looking at displacement,” he said.
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“The tasks will change; for example, mathematicians in the research and private sector will be doing different things.”
European Commission executive vice-president Henna Virkkunen, who is also the commissioner for Digital and Frontier Technologies, said Europe will have to triple its data centre capacity in five to seven years.
She acknowledged concerns of citizens across the bloc given the energy the centres consume.
“We are now supporting our member states to build also AI factories, and we have now an open call for gigafactories that we should have even more powerful supercomputers in the coming years and months than we have today,” she said.
During her speech, she said the EU’s AI Act would already regulate high-risk AI systems and models whether developed within the EU or in countries such as China or the United States.
She enumerated the risks of losing control of AI, including biological weapons, mass manipulation that could affect elections, and cyberattacks.
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The AI Act prevents “overlapping regulation across member states, keeping the European space predictable and simple for our start-ups and industry”, she told the conference.
The commission was “loud and clear” that AI must remain under human direction, she said. And the commission “stands ready to take all necessary steps to ensure that companies follow the AI Act rules, so that European people and companies can trust AI models and systems.”
In the last year, she said, AI was already showing many signs of improving people’s lives, including progress in flagging early signs of cancer.
In energy, AI was helping predict electricity demand and optimise power distribution. In June, the commission launched the AI grids initiatives framework to develop, train and deploy a pan-European AI model for power grids.
About 1,500 leaders in the AI world attended the conference. There was a small demonstration outside protesting against the amount of energy used by data centres to process AI.
