Chamber and committees

Thank you, convener. I will take as an example youth mobility, which you have touched on briefly, to understand how the process is working. We have seen conflicting news reports in recent weeks about whether the UK Government is changing or preparing to change its position on a youth mobility scheme. It is no great secret that I would like a maximal answer to that. I think the loss of freedom of movement is tragic. It is bad for our economy and society and there is a basic injustice in the fact that a generation of people who enjoyed freedom of movement have deprived the younger generation of that freedom.

However, in reality we are likely to see, if anything, a more modest change than the full restoration of the freedom of movement. Is the UK Government actively engaging the Scottish Government and other Governments within the UK in discussions on youth mobility? I hear support for it from the Scottish Government. We know that the Welsh Government has tried to make progress on it and wants to do more. We hear employers, trade unions and economists calling for it. The range of voices seeking a serious youth mobility scheme is broad and diverse and it seems as though the only voice in the room that is unwilling to say where it is going to go with this is the UK Government’s. Is the decision about where the UK should go being reached collectively, with the voice of the Scottish Government and other Scottish voices being heard, or not?

If I can move on to a practical example—

The point about hydrogen infrastructure is certainly relevant, although it is perhaps outwith the scope of this inquiry. If the cabinet secretary could give us in writing any further update on the status of the work on ETS alignment, that would be helpful.

I am asking not whether you know what the UK Government really wants yet, but whether, as the UK Government determines what it wants, something akin to a co-decision-making process between the Governments of the UK is emerging. Are you in the position of lobbying someone else who will make the decision, or is there a process of deciding together what our shared priorities are?

Is there an informal approach that seeks to achieve that, or is the process fundamentally unchanged?

Thank you.

I want to move on to another topic before we finish. Earlier in the second half of this inquiry, before we got deep into the youth mobility issues, we heard some evidence about energy issues. Could you reflect on that and, in particular, on the emissions trading scheme? It is an area where there is some co-decision-making, because the ETS is not wholly reserved—the Scottish Government is represented on an authority that makes some decisions.

We heard some evidence suggesting that, unless there is alignment between the UK ETS and the EU ETS, there will be an impact, from January next year, on businesses trading in and out of the EU. What is the Scottish Government’s position on that, and what is the status of that work? Also, is there a concern that, if a trade agreement was reached with a far-right US regime that promoted climate denial conspiracy theories, which would clearly not be likely to include a carbon price in products entering the UK market, there could be harmful impacts from that?

That is what you described as the moving target problem. Someone made a comment a few minutes ago that was relevant to that aspect, which was that the EU’s approach seems to be grounded in how AI is deployed in specific contexts, but that changes all the time. If we regulate for particular purposes, an AI system designed for one purpose may end up being trained for a completely different purpose and then used or reused for other purposes altogether, so even the EU’s approach to regulation is not hitting the mark. Is that fair?

All right—thank you.

That is why I wonder whether, instead of attempting to regulate the specific types of technology that can be used, we need to attempt to regulate human behaviour in relation to those technologies, and to regulate with a view to protecting people. I see nothing in the EU approach that frames the issue as being about how we protect people.

My last question will use an example from today’s news headlines about the requirement for new laws on planning a mass casualty attack. Professor Basiri, you talked about Instagram posts. Instagram is not legally responsible for the posts of its users. If AI continues to accelerate and we have something closer to true artificial general intelligence, who would be committing the crime if an AI agent had done the planning for such an attack? The Prime Minister has said that people should not spend their time doing things that AI can do better, but once that encompasses everything, where is the protection for people’s roles in all this? Do we need to reframe the challenge of regulation as being about protecting the human intelligence?