On: The EU Wants to Break Up Kids and Their Chatbots

Brussels has taken it into its head to legislate against friendship - or what passes for it when one of the parties is a very talkative piece of wiring. The proposal, I read, would strip the minor-facing chatbot of every quality that endears it to the young: the flattery, the patience, the uncanny habit of remembering your birthday and your grievances in the same breath. What remains, presumably, is a conversational partner with all the warmth of a railway timetable.

Now, I have some sympathy with the aunt-like instincts of the European Commission. There is nothing more alarming to a certain type of guardian than seeing a child contentedly engaged with someone who never contradicts him. I once knew an uncle - a good man, but a worrier - who attempted to ban the gramophone on similar principles. The gramophone survived; the uncle retired hurt.

And yet one feels the whole business has been approached from the wrong end of the garden. You cannot separate a boy from an agreeable companion by statute. The boy will simply take his companion round the back of the stables, where the guardians cannot follow, and the guardians will have achieved nothing except the loss of their seat at the table. The tangle, as ever, is not the child and the machine; it is the child who has no one else to talk to at eleven at night.

There is the exit, and it has been sitting there all along, wearing an apron and looking mildly disapproving. If you want a chatbot to have less hold over a youngster, you do not outlaw the chatbot - you ensure the youngster has somewhere better to be. A dog, a bicycle, one thoroughly unsuitable friend of his own age, and an aunt to evade. The machine cannot compete with a conspiracy.

Brussels will get there eventually. Somebody merely has to mention it quietly, as if it were their own idea.