Ireland’s strategy — “adopting a human-centric approach; staying open and adaptable to new innovations; and ensuring good governance to build trust and confidence for innovation to flourish” — is on all fours with the final agreement. 

This covers the evolutionary path of artificial intelligence and its integration with social media and search engines.

One of the most contentious issues of the rapidly-developing technology is its deployment in surveillance systems by security services, employers, or retailers, where images of the public are captured in real time and instantly assessed as a predictor of behaviour.

Nor is this some hellish vision conjured from the creative minds of a William Gibson or Philip K Dick. On the London Underground, AI software is already being trialled to detect fare dodgers and has identified passengers likely to jump barriers at Willesden Green on the Jubilee Line.

Fare dodging costs the British taxpayer nearly £130m per year and the transgressors are responsible for more than half of the verbal and physical attacks on Tube station staff. There are now plans to extend the trial and link the AI software to the network of station cameras.

Following the Dublin riots, Justice Minister Helen McEntee is to bring forward legislation to enable facial-recognition technology to quickly prosecute offenders involved in violence and looting. The use of the technology was initially drawn up to deal with murder, rape, terrorism, and child sexual abuse.

In this weekend’s agreement, the European Parliament secured a ban on use of real-time surveillance and biometric technologies, including emotional recognition, but with three exceptions: Police would be able to use the intrusive systems only in the event of an unexpected threat of a terrorist attack; the need to search for victims; and in the prosecution of serious crime. 

MEP negotiators said they had secured a guarantee that “independent authorities” would have to give permission to “predictive policing” to guard against abuse by police and to underline the presumption of innocence.

Laws are unlikely to come into effect until 2025 at the earliest. 

The digital road ahead will be long and complicated, but Europeans have now taken the first steps along it.

Extreme risk posed by synthetic drugs

It is a sign of the times when the most eye-catching warnings issued by the authorities do not relate to weather, but to highly dangerous synthetic drugs circulating in our communities.

One month after nitazenes, which can be “more deadly than fentanyl”, was linked to an unprecedented spike in overdoses in Dublin, heroin users in Cork have been warned of “extreme risk” over an unknown powder circulating in the city. Eight non-fatal overdoses were reported within 36 hours. 

The HSE say it carries “a substantial risk of overdose, hospitalisation, and death”.  Take advice. And stay safe out there.