Professor Gregory O'Hare:

Open source has, of course, always been heralded as sharing harmonisation, a provision of equality of opportunity and all the other phrases we have heard, and I have no reason to believe those benefits will not continue to persist.

What we are seeing is the potential use and intent associated with software that is openly provided. Had it not been provided openly, a clamour of questions would have been asked about concerns about an advantage being accrued by one large organisation and the potential uneven playing field that would produce. Open source is still a good thing, notwithstanding some of the difficulties that have manifested themselves of late.

On the Senator's second question about how we can control this, I remind members that the history of AI is strewn with attempts to achieve a definition of artificial intelligence. Intermediate definitions have been proposed and largely agreed upon but they have probably largely been superseded. Striving for a definition of AI is fundamentally difficult. It is almost akin to beauty. I cannot really define it but if I walk into a room and my eyes behold it, I will absolutely instantly recognise it. It is difficult to legislate for something that is so difficult to even define. We need to move rapidly. Even the speed at which we are moving at a European level is not sufficient. The boundaries around this technology are not governed by political or geographic barriers.