Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is great. I thank the witnesses. The content this afternoon has been fascinating. When I first came into the Oireachtas, I used to feel that if I raised issues like this, people would look around and wonder where my tinfoil hat was because my thinking seemed so catastrophic. I have been on a campaign to have no smartphones. I do not believe children should have smartphones. I welcomed the research from Cybersafe Kids last week regarding one in four six-year-olds having a smartphone and 45% of ten-year-olds having access to their phones in a room without any supervision. I think this is quite a frightening prospect. At the same time, I suppose I know the diagnostic benefits of all of the ways in which AI is deployed for the benefit and betterment of society and for the common good. However, there are things that have been neglected. Regarding the idea of values alignment, I like the terminology of all of that.

Some of the material I read, worry about and consider in respect of trying to figure out how we can get our heads around it involves this idea of cognitive security. We have children growing up in a context where the horse has already bolted. We are now in a world where children have smartphones and where parents do not engage and do not consider the dangers that therein lurk for their children. We have a system that deploys AI or, rather, companies that deploy AI to deliberately capture attention. It is the attention of the individual that is being sold. This is the business model. While these companies are allowing us and children access to content, what they are actually selling and commodifying is the attention of those children with inherent and deliberately conceived addiction and behavioural consequences, as well as isolating and dehumanising consequences.

I refer to children growing up with a complete lack of resilience and ability to have self-respect and self-regard. Their regard is for how many likes they get and the impulse related to this metric. My child does not have a phone. She goes on YouTube on the television in front of us in the room when we are in the room. This is because she must be able to go into school and talk about the YouTubers with all the other girls in her class in the same way I went in and talked about who was on the national song contest or Eurovision with the other girls in my class. I feel a duty as a parent to ensure my child has a certain amount of access so that she can be or feel relevant. At the same time, I am wary that she is commodified, that there is a potential for her to be isolated and dehumanised and that she is being stalked by algorithms and AI systems for the particular clicks and likes, as we all are.

My fear in all of this is that we are not talking about the context. We are not talking about the fact that our culture has already changed. I remember dial-up Internet access and the associated sounds and all that. I remember when that was the case. Now, however, I expect to connect instantly and not have the blue line taking ages to come when I am looking up information. Regarding this idea of friction-free access, yes, we are impatient to have everything at our fingertips. We think we have a right to it and all of that.

We have a duty concerning public awareness. Personally, I think we should have a special category of taxation that completely funds global enforcement in this context. The idea of Mark Zuckerberg standing up, looking around, probably at the prompting of his PR people, and apologising in the United States Congress to parents who had lost children is horrific, to be perfectly honest, knowing that behind all that is a deliberate for-profit model that has, deliberately and consciously, deployed this approach.

We need to have a way of litigating against those who have deep pockets. The mob rule that puts up horrific content or amplifies misinformation and disinformation usually involves some idiots in garages who do not have deep pockets, so I would be wasting my time suing them. The best place for me to sue is Facebook. None of us who are politicians, and I am sure this is the case for many others in the room as well, sit here free of and unscathed by the horrific implications of having to contact the Garda about the things that happen to us. It is a waste of time going after those individuals in their garages, except in the criminal sphere. We must be able to access and hold the likes of Meta and all those types of companies liable for the publishing of what is there. I cannot figure out, though, how we are going to do that, in a way, because they work on such a global sphere. If Ireland alone were to do this and bring in this type of legislation, those companies would figure out a way around it.

Meta, Google or one of these multinationals threatened Australia a few years ago when that country threatened to bring in legislation to put a limit on them. I feel we need a public information campaign that calls this out for what it is, namely, that it is an appalling business model, which, in itself, needs to be challenged, kicked back against and taxed the hell out of until oblivion. We must, however, also be able to go after those with the deep pockets from a suing and liability perspective. I welcome ideas from the witnesses on how we can do this.