David McWilliams

for humans not just specifics of one sector because if you think what we're doing is we're in play replacing that notion of human intelligence now let's look at exactly what's the situation in ireland situation

have this enormous excess of tax revenue coming from the tech companies.

The question is, will that remain flowing for the government?

I am not too sure.

What the tech companies want to do, David, is they want to ultimately generate the same amount of revenue with less cost.

So what you might actually see in the case of Ireland is the same amount of tax revenue

with less income tax paid.

Same around corporate tax revenue with less people working in the jobs.

David, the Irish policymaking has, because of the extraordinary, as you say, windfall or largesse of the multinational and particularly the tech companies within the multinational sector, Irish policymaking has become in effect hostage to the multinationals.

at the lowest cost possible so where can they get that in the world and the reason they can get that in ireland is our tax system makes their cost base very very low now what they might be looking at and i'm sure they are looking at is the possibility that they will have the same amount of revenue with less people now of course then what that does is that impacts as you say

the overall amount of people working in the tech sector in ireland so the question then for the irish government is what do you do about it what can you do about it is there anything you can do about it or is this just the way in which the global economy adapts to technological change but i would say that the way you could look at this for the whole society is that the implications of ai are socially profound because the money

that has been spent by Meta.

So I think the quote was $100 billion.

The only way you can get that money back is if it generates $100 billion more in revenue, David,

reduces $100 billion in cost.

And what they're looking for now is the one thing about AI is nobody's figured out really how to pay for it.

This is the quite interesting thing, is that lots and lots of people are using AI for free.

So that means that these tech companies are beginning to panic because they have spent so many hundreds of billions.

I mean, Meta itself is

last year spent $100 billion on AI investment.