Joan Mulvihill

I think one of the things that I have an issue with in terms of Ireland's approach to AI right now is just a very nuanced fact that the office of AI, the government office for AI is in the department of enterprise jobs and innovation.

And I just think that to look at AI as a money-making opportunity is, is the wrong lens through which we should be looking at a societally impactful technology.

And if we're only looking at it from the point of view of how can we create businesses to scale, then we're missing the point of its power.

And I am very concerned around that.

I think we should have and could have taken a broader approach on it.

I do think there are some good people from an academic point in Ireland point of view.

Like I think people like Barry O'Sullivan has been bang on both in terms of his understanding of the power of the technology, because he's been at it forever.

But he marries that so well with the ethics and a balanced view of deployment.

And I think there are some good and responsible voices there.

But when it comes to politicians themselves, I worry to what extent any of them can really get under the hood of it or confront it when we as an economy, and as I talked about, this is all about trade-offs.

When you look at the density of the technology companies that are here.

And that informs our decisions all the time for the, that informs our decisions for the short to medium term all of the time.

And we're never prepared to say to, to we'll toy with this.

I did a, I did a radio interview last week.

Sorry, I'm digressing on, you know, this whole banning of social media for under 16s and I'm going crazy.

you know, it's missing the point.

That's not what, that's not where the problem is.

It's not about banning social media for 16s.

They can vibe code their own social media app themselves in 20 minutes, probably half of them.

And the statistics coming out of Australia are showing a very, very marginal decrease because there's so many workarounds, kids are savvy, you know.