Chamber and committees

Good morning. It is an absolute privilege for us to get the benefit of some of your precious time this morning.

I want to come to Dex Hunter-Torricke first. Your hinterland is quite startling, and you have recently started working with the Treasury. Given the private sector career that you have had thus far, what is your perspective as someone who has come in and engaged with the public sector?

Our Scottish Government is working on an AI strategy and plan at the moment, and I suspect that the challenge that it faces is what to make a priority when everything feels as though it is a priority and when you yourself have said that AI integration is more than a technology. What advice would you give the Scottish Government?

There are a lot of follow-up questions that I could ask, but I want to bring in Kayla-Megan Burns.

Earlier, you mentioned some statistics. I know that some of them came from the report on the RSNO’s economic impact, because we held an event on that last week in Parliament, but it would be useful to know, for the record, where the other statistics came from.

Yes. It is just a tiny point, which I do not want to take too much time on, but is the issue not even more complex than that with music? As you have explained, everything has been scraped, but you can create entirely new pieces made up of the best of the rest, if you like. I could sit and listen to Mahler 5, for example, and I could tell you which player it is in the trumpet solo in the opening; I could listen to “Nessun Dorma” and tell you whether the tenor singing the top C is Pavarotti, Domingo or Kaufmann. You could basically splice the best of the rest. It is not as simple, surely, as just taking an artist in a song or whatever; you could create something note by note with key thematics.

Thank you very much for that.

I think that the RSNO has been very leading in putting you on the board, given the kind of concerns that many creatives have about AI. It would be useful to flesh out which sector in the creative arts has the most concerns. The RSNO has done a tremendous amount. I have seen the uptake of its live performances by audiences. You correctly pointed out that it has done some marvellous stuff with recording, such as its recent recording of the music for “Nuremberg” at its film studio.

However, there is something about the authenticity of live music. How do you see AI being able to be integrated to enhance the service offering of a live orchestra such as the RSNO? In other words, what ideas have you brought to the board of the RSNO about how it might be able to get ahead of the game?

I want to follow up a point that Steve Aitken made. Ethics has been a golden thread running through the three evidence sessions we have had. We have heard the need for that emphasised by a variety of witnesses. If we forecast forward, AI is potentially a significant disrupter to our society. For many people, having more leisure time is a curse as well as an opportunity. On your point, therefore, about ethics, does it mean that from a skills perspective that we should be teaching ethics in schools because humanity—and I appreciate that this is quite a big question—will have to encounter this existential crisis, arguably triggered by significant momentum in AI? In this committee we are not going to solve any of that, but should we be thinking practically about teaching more ethics in schools to counter some of this?

Somewhere in the multitude of evidence that we have received, the Scottish Government said, “We have to do this,” and claimed that no other solutions were offered. However, we had commentary from Homes for Scotland last week that it had not been asked to come up with any other solutions, so it felt slightly irked to hear that no other solutions were proffered when it had not been asked. I take it that it is too late in the day to ask for any other solutions and that you are completely wedded to this.

We did have that conversation. Fionna Kell from Homes for Scotland made the point that the new build market size has been overstated by about £1.4 billion. She also commented that we are using estimates of estimates because we are following what is happening down south. That concern played into what was alluded to earlier, which is not just a lack of financial modelling but behavioural modelling, which I think the convener was alluding to when he mentioned the Laffer curve. Do you want to put some meat in the bones of that to start to model it properly? Surely you will have to do that to set the rate. I know what you have said about a date, but you will have to have some understanding of the modelling to set the rate.

That is a risk in itself, and given the slowness to respond, it is a critical risk. Somebody could litigate against you and saying that you are waiting on the Scottish Government is not a defence under the law.

Do you not think that there are risks? Down south, the tax will be linked to the completion certificate—people will not be able to get that until they have paid the tax—but that is not the plan here. That seems to be a kind of—

What assessment have you made from a risk perspective, particularly from a corporate risk perspective, of the Supreme Court judgment earlier this year? Many organisations have left that with their HR departments, but it must be assessed as a corporate risk, given the potential for litigation. What has your approach been?