Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)

I thank the witnesses for their presentations and for their work. They have really got to the nub of the issues as regards the relationship between ethics and the market, who is driving this, whose interests are being driven and what will happen if we do not interfere with that market-driven development. I will begin on that. If we think back to the early days of social media, this was sold to us all - and many of us believed it - as a way for us to be more connected and to stay in touch with workmates, school friends or whatever. We were going to be more connected than ever before and it was going to be great. Yet, somehow, people have this feeling that it has led to a society where people are less connected and more alienated from one another than we were before, even though we can see one another's pictures on the Internet and so on. It is a sense that we signed up to this in order to be connected and then somehow, some kind of impersonal forces have actually made us less connected and our world less connected and more divided than previously.

I fear the same can definitely happen in terms of AI. It is the same people, mostly, who are involved in driving it and certainly the same motivation. That relates to a particular question I direct to Age Action on the question of chatbots. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk will tell us the chatbots are going to be great. They will explicitly say that older people are going to have a companion in chatbots. What is the witnesses' view on that perspective? Do they know of any case studies or examples of people using chatbots as companions or so on?