Meeting of the Parliament 13 November 2019
Today’s debate on artificial intelligence and data-driven technologies is important. At decision time, we will support the Scottish Government motion.
We have lodged an amendment to the motion in order to highlight the significant opportunities that are available for the development of Al in Scotland through the United Kingdom industrial strategy. I will come back to that later.
The minister opened the debate by emphasising the massive opportunities and challenges that will arise from artificial intelligence. She provided an update on initiatives in that area, including the development of a nationwide strategy. We welcome those initiatives.
We also recognise the vital cross-sector collaboration by key stakeholders in the area, including the Royal Society of Edinburgh— Scotland’s national academy—the Scottish Council for Development and Industry, ScotlandIS and BT Scotland, whose valuable joint report looked at the future impact of these technologies in Scotland. We also recognise the significant work of the Data Lab in pioneering the nationwide strategy to which the minister referred. If Scotland is to fully realise our economic and social potential in the fourth industrial evolution, that collaborative, cross-sector approach will be essential.
Artificial intelligence is a massive subject, which spans from what Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, has described as the “single biggest existential crisis” that humanity faces, to what Stephen Hawking described as a “new form of life” that will outperform humans. However, for the purpose of today’s debate, I will focus on the transformational impact that Al will have on every aspect of Scotland’s economy.
As the minister said, PwC estimated that Al technologies could lead to the creation of more than half a million jobs in Scotland and that it could add more than £13 billion to the economy. Machine learning is already driving revolutions across a number of sectors by unlocking the predictive power of large data sets. In sectors such as healthcare, machine learning is used to generate predictive outcomes for NHS patients, resulting in a transformation of treatment options.