{"id":561574,"date":"2026-08-07T07:36:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T07:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/561574\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T07:36:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T07:36:07","slug":"i-have-yet-to-be-convinced-that-the-current-zeal-for-ai-is-anything-more-than-a-bubble-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/561574\/","title":{"rendered":"I have yet to be convinced that the current zeal for AI is anything more than a bubble \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have to talk to my son about technology a lot. At eight years old, he uses tablets, headsets and gaming consoles that would have seemed like witchcraft to me in the early 1990s. He\u2019s also more aware of technology in its broader, more cultural sense, often in ways I don\u2019t particularly relish. It\u2019s not ideal, for example, that he knows Elon Musk<\/a> by name, nor that he sometimes asks what my favourite AI<\/a> is. <\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t have access to large language models like ChatGPT<\/a> or Claude, but his favourite YouTubers do, and from them he\u2019s imbibed a sense of AI as an important, perhaps even magical, thing \u2013 a notion I do my best to dispel.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve written about before<\/a>, I think parents should resist the urge to beat themselves up over moral panics regarding the evils of technology. But I\u2019m also innately suspicious about the motives and behaviour of the people in charge of said technology, nowhere more than when it comes to AI. <\/p>\n

For all my tech optimism, I have yet to be convinced that the current zeal for AI is anything more than a bubble. At its best, as with machine learning\u2019s applications in medical diagnoses or complex pattern reading, AI seems like a useful, even extraordinary, tool, albeit one vastly oversold as the solution to all life\u2019s problems. At worst, as with its promises to make workers, scientists or artists redundant, it seems patently absurd, unless one views AI the way a billionaire seems to; as a tool for doing away with the difficult problem of paying humans for their labours, so that the wealthy may access skills, while barring the skilled from accessing wealth. <\/p>\n

And, to put it mildly, when tech chief executives, politicians and journalists talk about the need to restructure education to facilitate AI, I\u2019m afraid I hear the distant pop of a bubble bursting over all our heads.<\/p>\n

I try to get the balance right. To tell my son the same thing I increasingly find myself telling my fellow parents: that our modern technological age is incredible, but not to believe everything one hears about its magical qualities. <\/p>\n

I learned this balance when I was not much older than my son is now, since my dad was a PC hobbyist. His workplace didn\u2019t have a dedicated IT department \u2013 few did in 1995 \u2013 so he eagerly served that purpose. This meant spending incalculable hours fiddling with dozens of machines he\u2019d been made to take home, so he could discover what made them tick, and refurbish them back to broadly usable states.<\/p>\n

From this, my brother Conall and I learned the exciting, frustrating rudiments of PC maintenance by the time we were leaving primary school. At 12, we were connecting servers via local area networks. Conall became adept at coding and still works as a software developer, whereas I used everything I\u2019d learned to build a brief but lucrative mini-empire selling cracked copies of PC games to my schoolmates.<\/p>\n

School was easy meat for such wheezes, since the education system\u2019s approach to this same technology was so behind the times as to be laughable. My GCSE classes in ICT (the term IT hadn\u2019t been adopted yet) were hilariously outdated. Large parts of our study materials concerned Electronic Point of Sale machines and how they worked. The primary use case of a computing GCSE \u2013 in 2002, I will remind you \u2013 seemed to be knowing how to fix supermarket registers and cashpoints.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0I longed to be part of a gang of local kids, though nature did furnish me with 10 siblingsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

To be clear, everyone in my class knew these materials were absurd at the time. I may have come from an oddly computer-literate household, but we were all online. Our main textbook included a quote that made the entire room roar with laughter, and which I\u2019ve remembered, verbatim, ever since. \u201cOne day\u201d it said brightly, in an exciting little stat box that crouched beneath a stylised image of planet Earth, connected with luminous green wires, \u201cas many as five million people around the world will be using electronic mail\u201d. This, less than five years away from the unveiling of the iPhone, was preposterously out-of-date as reading a science textbook expounding on the wonders of whale oil.<\/p>\n

But I hark to it now \u2013 to the cautious, touching optimism of that statement, to the sprightly little graphic depicting an online globe. A futuristic thrill I\u2019d like my son to feel, beyond slop-filled YouTube videos and frictionless, generative content. To remember that, for all its flaws, we now live on that planet, in that far-flung future, more connected to each other than its author could ever dream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have to talk to my son about technology a lot. At eight years old, he uses tablets,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385284,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,4036,516,9822,4974,111,139,69,8765,199880,1414,145],"class_list":["post-561574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-elon-musk","tag-for-you","tag-magazine","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-parenting","tag-seamas-o-reilly","tag-social-media","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=561574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}