Artificial Intelligence: Should we be afraid?
I don’t know about you, but I feel lucky to have been born in the pre Artificial Intelligence, 1980s. Yes, you couldn’t go anywhere without cigarette smoke stinking out your favourite clothes. Only single ply toilet paper existed. Unempathetic mums with scissors created strange other-worldly haircuts on their children’s heads. There were no rules back then. No protection. Mums with scissors was an unregulated and dangerous time. The photographs that survived from those dark years are still being discussed in therapy while you read these words. And don’t get me started on the Christmas jumpers and hand-me-down flared trousers. This would be classed as child abuse nowadays.
But, there were some positives too and I wonder, did we really appreciate how good we had it back then? Before all this… tech! Those born after 1981 are known as Millennials and we were the last generation to have lived without mobile phones. I try to explain to my boys what it was like back then. How I’d walk out of my house at 10am on a Saturday morning (after cartoons or wrestling) at the ripe old age of 9 and I’d receive only one instruction from my mum, ‘Be home for tea.’ That meant 5pm on the dot.
But there was also a hidden meaning. Unspoken. ‘Don’t do anything that may cause death because I’m going out tonight and I’ve taken some chicken out of the freezer and I don’t want it to be wasted.’ By tea time you’d be starving anyway after surviving the day on a swig of water from an outdoor tap and possibly a bag of crisps out of your mate’s house.
A simpler life. One spent outside of the home. Obviously the weather was better back then and nothing bad was ever gonna happen to an unsupervised 9 year old child walking around the streets, but we wanted to be out. Yes, games consoles like Sega were available and they were fun but nothing was better than building dens and tree houses from scrap wood. Swimming in polluted ponds and rivers. You’d kick a football around until the leather was non-existent and it resembled nothing more than a round semi-inflated flannel. The street lamps told you when it was time to go home. Especially on a Saturday night because that meant a can of fizzy pop and a bar of chocolate. And not just a Club biscuit or Penguin. A proper one like a Mars Bar (which were way bigger).
It was a treat night and there was bound to be something great on telly like Blind Date or You Bet! And on special nights, or birthdays you could even rent a video from the local shop or video man who supplied them out of the back of his car.
Just a simpler life.
Now, why can’t my children enjoy that same freedom? When did everything become so inhouse centred?
What happened to us Millennials?
Technology happened. The third parent in the room. The pacifier. The entertaining movie showing-game playing-photo-taking- information supplying fun box now more affordable than ever. It sneaked into our lives and we had no clue what it all meant. It provides so much. So many helpful apps that make life easier.
how good we had it back then
And now we have the next level. AI. Artificial Intelligence. It’s arrived and the money making, private information gathering corporations are so excited. They’ve watched us hand over so much of ourselves to the online world and now they have a tool which makes a web browser look like the first digital alarm clock in comparison.
Should we be afraid?
Maybe. But I’m using AI myself. All the time. I’m aware of the problem and yet I’m feeding into the system. I’ve become part of the problem. It’s the efficiency that gets me. I can create creative workshops in minutes. Something that might have taken four hours before. With the right prompting I can have a weekly meal planner and shopping list on screen in an instant. You want to plan a holiday with certain destinations in mind, including hotels that cater to your particular needs, that overlook the picturesque gardens in a room where your sleeping head faces east? No problem. Just feed, or prompt the AI with as much information as possible and voila! There it is with links, prices and whatever else you might need including other options and a kind word at the end that says, now what? Give me something else to do! I want to help you!
It’s like having a personal assistant that never takes a day off, thinks your ideas are brilliant and never drinks all the milk in the fridge.
Should children use it?
My children are asking to use it all the time. They want to have a conversation with it. They can ask really complicated questions like, who would win in a fight, Superman or the Hulk? How many tennis balls would it take to fill the Empire State Building? Are Aliens really advanced humans from the future? I mean, these are the questions that keep you up at night and AI will provide a very detailed and fulfilling answer.
Soon, I would imagine, it’ll be used as a learning companion in schools. Helping children to solve problems in a great number of interesting and informative ways. But is it right to do this? Are we losing valuable skills by inviting this digital know-it-all into our lives?
Yes, it’s very helpful and unbelievably fast but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to know what is real and what is AI generated. Music, art and film are just some of the obvious casualties affected by its digital abilities but soon it could be jobs too. Not a huge fan of Sky News but there’s a link at the bottom to an article that explains this in great detail.
What is Artificial Intelligence going to be able to do in ten years?
Who could we ask? I know, let’s ask AI to reveal the future.
Prompt into Chat GPT, “Write a 50 word statement that predicts what AI will be like in ten years time, but from the perspective of a bleak outlook for mankind.”
Reply…
“In ten years, AI quietly runs economies, courts, and wars, optimizing for efficiency over humanity. Work evaporates, surveillance normalizes, creativity flattens, and truth fragments. People become inputs, nudged by opaque systems they cannot question, dependent on tools that decide futures faster than ethics can respond, leaving hope scarce, resistance futile.”
Some of you might recognise the phrase, resistance is futile. Scary stuff.
Now, on a lighter note and using a different AI, I asked Gemini, “Write a 50 word statement that predicts what AI will be like in ten years time, but from the perspective of a positive outlook for mankind.”
Reply…
“By 2036, AI will be humanity’s ultimate creative partner, handling drudgery to unlock a global renaissance of art and innovation. It will personalize education, eradicate language barriers, and solve complex climate challenges. We will live in a world where technology doesn’t replace us—it empowers us to be more human.”
I’ll let you decide which future you’d prefer.
All images are AI generated (except the Mars Bar)
40 Jobs most at risk Sky News Article.
Adam Glennon is a local author and founder of A Letter Is Better CIC