Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 7 November 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Session 1: The Evidence

Mr. Roger McNamee:

Honestly, I do not know the answer to that question. Speaking philosophically, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg and the founders of Google believe efficiency is the most important goal in the universe; therefore, they are trying to eliminate friction. Everything needs to be automated and scalable. As many things as possible would be ignored. The notion of regulations and criticism is a form of friction with which they would not like to deal. If Mr. Zuckerberg puts in place an AI-based moderation system that can find 98% of child pornography, the problem is we would be dealing with billions of transactions and being only 98% right still means there would be tens of millions or hundreds of millions of failures. In the context of democracy, that is completely unacceptable. As much as I believe artificial intelligence will evolve eventually to having very powerful capability, today it is far more limited than the people who are pushing it are willing to admit.

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