Little Sister is used to my pleading calls on a random workday afternoon: ‘Sis! I neeeeeed yyyooouuu! Maths! Arrgghhh!’
Though she is a thousand miles away, she has always been my go to when I find myself in an accounting muddle, and luckily for me, she happily grabs a cuppa and gets stuck into the latest equation that has me tied up in knots.
Maths has always been a foreign language to me. Though I’m perfectly capable with the day to day bits and bobs of life’s accounting, as soon as fractions/percentages/long division rear their unwelcome heads I reach for the phone, because as I try and work it out, my brain squeals in panic, packs a suitcase, and books a flight to the Bahamas.
Little Sister is a treasure of patience, and with clarity of words she guides me step by step towards the eventual sum. Though it’s not guaranteed that I’ll fully get it, it doesn’t matter. Little Sister always knows.
I could of course have jumped online and chatted to any number of AI models, where a heavily-guarded data centre in the middle of the country would have crunched the numbers and delivered the sum to me in a flash. But for me, any thoughts of using AI are still secondary to that soon-to-be old dinosaur, an actual human. This is why you’ll see me at the human-operated till in Sainos, and if there is a helpline number I can call with a person on the end, I will call it.
Like many of us, you’ll find me hovering on the outskirts of AI, usually in observation mode as I read the energies. So far, it feels incredibly chaotic, yet moving at a swift pace regardless, its tentacles reaching far and wide into corners we don’t think it will. In less than five years, our lives will be unrecognisable, but you don’t need to be clairvoyant to know that. For some, AI will be so integral to their existence that a life without it will seem unimaginable. For others, it will propel them more quickly into an organic New Earth community in the woods. The rest of us will find ourselves somewhere in-between.
Afterwards, I did input the maths puzzle into AI, and I certainly saved time. But what am I saving the time for, if not human connection? So why not have the human connection in the first place?
It would be so easy for me to choose the AI ‘second’ over the human ‘20 minutes’ because you know, life!, busy!, things to do! But I can see that a 20-minute loss of connection will become a day of loss, will become a week, a year, and a lifetime of loss.
No transatlantic video calls, no chatting, no Little Sister. All replaced by a screen and computer-generated voice that thinks it knows me. But AI is no match for my sibling. And while Little Sister still picks up the phone, I will still be calling.