Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Most technology can be used either to benefit human beings or for malign purposes. I do not trust the people who control this technology, or the people who dominate the political scene in most of the world, to use this technology to the benefit of society. One of the best films ever made in my opinion - if you have not watched it, you should - is Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times", in which he brilliantly satirises the impact of Fordist industrial technology to deepen the exploitation of human beings, and turn human beings into machines purely to be exploited by greedy capitalists. The danger he alluded to in that brilliant film remains with us today. There is a Deputy elected to this House who had to be suspended from his party because he was associated with, and a shareholder in, a company called Palantir that was providing digital technology to kill people and identify so-called terrorists for the US and Israeli militaries. One of the things I thought people should consider about this company is its name. We know digital technology can benefit people but, in this case, it was used to target people and kill them, including during the genocide in Palestine over the past year and a half. The name of the company, Palantir, which should have rung a few alarm bells, comes from The Lord of the Rings. It is the seeing stone of the dark lord Sauron, who is the evil character. It is used to see everything and manipulate people to the benefit of the dark lord. Imagine the people who set up that company using that name for the company.

When setting up that company, they knew what they were doing and that it was for evil purposes. Why else would they name the company after the all-seeing eye of the dark lord Sauron? Unfortunately, there are a lot of these people in the world. They do not care about the benefits to society. They certainly do not care about workers. Artists, performers, writers, directors and so on are rightly very worried about what is already happening in the arts industry. Essentially, copies of them are being made. They are being moved out of the process and replaced with machines that use their avatars to produce art, writing and so on. While this technology is controlled by people who are only interested in profit, I will be deeply suspicious about it. Control of this technology must be used to benefit ordinary working people and we must not have a government led by people who are making vast profits out of this technology and who do not give a damn about the future of our planet or about working people.

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