PRESERVING social cohesion is the greatest challenge society faces in adapting to information technology, according to Mr Luc Soete.
Mr Soete, chairman of the European Commission's expert group on Societal Aspects of the Information Society, said the consumption of immaterial commodities of the type produced by new technology raised major problems.
In the past, goods like washing machines were produced to save people time.
Now, to enjoy the products of new technology, consumers were required to create time for themselves, he said.
However, people with time to enjoy the new products, like the unemployed, lacked the resources to acquire and use them. And people with jobs lacked the time to use the new products.
He suggested the imposition of a tax on new technology. This would help the state finance support services for the large numbers of unskilled workers being made redundant by new technology, he said.
A tax would also be an incentive to make people with new technology use it efficiently and productively.
At present people using new technology for activities like the electronic transfer of knowledge, paid no tax on the process. People transferring information in other ways often had to pay taxation.
Mr Soete also argued that new technology was not adequately measured within the overall economy. He believed inflation was overestimated in most European Union economies by 2 or 3 per cent as a result, while real economic growth was underestimated by a similar amount.
He questioned whether intellectual property should be copyrighted. "It makes no sense to say that somewhere out there is someone who is the owner of a particular idea."
. Speakers at yesterday's conference repeatedly referred to the need to devise a computer "driving licence" for people entering the labour market.
Mr Dudley Dolan, senior lecturer at TCD's department of computer science, said it was currently devising such a "licence", based on an existing scheme in Finland.
Of 10,000 Finns with computer driving licences, 65 per cent were women and 48 per were unemployed, he said.
This suggested that the advent of new technology did not automatically lead to social exclusion.