Hong Kong legislature uses AI to analyse debate, highlights livelihood focus
Hong Kong's Legislative Council used AI for the first time to analyse three days of debate on the city's first five-year plan and policy address. Nearly 30 per cent of speech content focused on improving people's livelihood, according to President Betty Lau.
Hong Kong's Legislative Council has deployed artificial intelligence for the first time to analyse lawmakers' speeches during a three-day combined debate on the city's first five-year plan and this year's policy address, President Betty Lau said on 17 October.
Eighty-eight lawmakers spoke for a total of more than 26 hours, delivering 214 speeches amounting to around 450,000 words of verbatim records, Lau wrote on a social media platform. The secretariat of the Legislative Council used AI to produce an overview of the debate.
According to the AI-generated overview, the session on improving people's livelihood attracted the most speakers, accounting for nearly 30 per cent of all speech content. The document will be shared with lawmakers and submitted to the government to help it grasp key concerns raised during the debate, Lau said.
Lau noted that lawmakers' contributions showed both a broad strategic vision, focusing on talent, technology and city governance, and attention to livelihood issues, including birth support, youth employment challenges, healthcare reform, and the development of local and niche tourism. The overview also summarised lawmakers' key recommendations and provided digests for each of the six debate segments.
According to the overview, 77 lawmakers commented on talent issues, proposing a dynamic mechanism under which the city's talent list could be updated annually, with the addition of specialists such as those in AI. On the Northern Metropolis development, 71 lawmakers offered views, including calls to develop a university city with a differentiated positioning around a "half-hour living and research circle" to avoid becoming a "university relocation scheme". On innovation and technology research, some lawmakers suggested incorporating industry-academia-research performance into government departments' key performance indicators and easing eligibility thresholds for the "1+1 Industry-Academia-Research Scheme".