Dr. Johnny Ryan:

The Senator left that bit out of the story. These technological questions can be viewed in the context of many technologies. Let us take ammonia, for example. More than 100 years ago, there was a significant advance in ammonia and it changed fertilisers. That allowed us to have a global population not of 1.5 billion people, but of 8 billion people. The same technology is what revolutionised ordnance. All the explosions in the First World War would have been much tinier if we had not had the breakthrough in that chemical process. On one hand, many more humans were able to survive on the planet, while on the other hand there was mass carnage. Technology keeps presenting these problems. It has gifts and drawbacks and it is for us to balance them.

In the context of the story of media, sometimes people look at Gutenberg's printing press as a moment before which there was an oral tradition where information was flexible and changed. There was no authority and things were not written down. Then the printing press came along. When the church, through the Council of Trent, was trying to enforce what the Bible is, it could not do so because things were written down with berry juice on animal hide. The printing press, however, allowed us to finally have the absolute truth, until Web 2.0, Wikipedia and now the new morality. Our generation is at a hinge point in history where we are dealing with these new things and information is flexible. Luckily, we have an incredibly simple and elegant solution, to finally answer Senator Ruane's question from earlier. In the case of recommender systems, solely for the big social media video platforms, we can apply this across the market. It is not necessary to look at each person's device or app. Rather we can say we are not going to allow a particular system to be on by default. It is similar to the worries there may have been about the printing press and its possible consequences. We have been at this game long enough to have some levers we can pull.