Sick of ai being pushed down our collective throats with no choice in the matter.

I will preface this by saying I work in a big tech related field so I basically need to get on with embracing AI or find a new industry, however that aside, I think we are at a juncture similar to when the internet became mainstream in the late 90s/early 00s and it can’t be avoided or ignored. Some work will inevitably become obsolete but it will also create new and different opportunities, children will need to be taught how to navigate that safely in the same way we now teach them about the internet. We are here online on Mumsnet so we can appreciate the benefits and challenges of internet for modern life. there are lessons to be learned from the ‘lawlessness’ of the internet and the effects we feel of that now, however AI already has significant regulation and guardrails compared to the internet in its early days.

So why not scrap the new multi million industry of fire fighting and go back to actually producing what we need ourselves in an ecologically sustainable manner.

Amen, sister! (To the op)

I am not seeing what value added AI is giving us and I’ve not been convinced by computers for a while, since ‘Web 2.0’ really. I used to like the WWW and the potential for information sharing that it offered. If anyone is interested, even Tim Berners Lee has expressed doubts.

I do not need a machine with dubious operators to read websites and summarise my information for me.

I do not see that our little island can supply the energy and water requirements for AI when it is already struggling to provide for all the humans here, and has already lost so much wildlife and habitats in the last 20 years. The whole world is already struggling ecologically and cannot afford this technology which costs so much and offers so little.

It’s gone beyond us now. US and China are fighting for control of AI whoever wins rules the earth. We (UK) are pretty irrelevant to this as we are out of the game. I only realised this recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/26/can-ais-suffer-big-tech-and-users-grapple-with-one-of-most-unsettling-questions-of-our-times

And this is going so far down the rabbit hole I am sorely tempted to get under my duvet and stay there forever.

@Beboopbadoopie I worry for my children, what will they even have to do when they are older?
People will be needed in droves to clear things up every time AI fucks up. Managing IT failures is already a £multi-billion industry. In the seventies we were told technology would give us all five days off a week, and electricity would be too cheap to meter. But we're working harder and longer than ever and costs are through the roof.

I worry for my children, what will they even have to do when they are older? What will their world be like?

I wonder what the government think will happen when there is mass unemployment - will we have a universal wage? Who is going to pay that if the AI companies are making all the money? I doubt Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk are keen on sharing. I feel the government are just ignoring the problem in the name of 'progress'!

@ForestAtTheSea Sorry, I should've been clearer

I meant jobs that are physically easier to do. Or jobs that AI would find easier to do. So the companies are bound to target stuff that's cheap and straightforward from their perspective.

With the technology available on the oil rigs etc, I did wonder if "digital twinning" was just a new term for something that already exists, but I didn't know about.

I don't tend to say generative AI because I tend to think of it as the logical development of AI, if that makes sense.

@EmeraldRoulette

what are the "easier jobs", though? composers or writers might have gone through college / university education, but collecting the bins is tough manual labour in all weathers and the necessity to get up at 3-4 am, to start at 7 - it probably varies by location. Depending on the country, waste collector is a job with an apprenticeship of 2-3 years.
They are both difficult jobs which require an education, but from completely different fields.

Haven't seen the laundry robots yet but your observation that they are very slow and need two robots shows that replicating manual tasks can be much more challenging and can help appreciate the work that people do.

I agree with you that robots and AI are extremely helpful when there are hazardous conditions - leaks in chemical plants for example - and in disaster zones and can help in quickly assessing complex situations. They can also help the emergency services.
But it is still very important that humans have the final oversight over decisions. And it also needs to be established in advance who is liable when there are errors, when the end users do not know the programming and decision making process of AI support.

However, disaster recovery is usually an area where there is not enough manpower right after an event, there is a deficit in both people and information, which means technical assistance can be tremendously helpful.

This is not the case in many other areas.

I know of the idea of digital twins.
But when a burst water pipe distributed water under a road, I don't think it can be fixed by remote work alone. Even if you have equipment that runs through the pipes and finds and fixes problems independently, for complex faults you'd probably still need to repair more than the pipe itself.

And this equipment was already available for wastewater pipes or oil and gas pipelines before there were digital twins, so it doesn't depend on it - though combining both is probably more efficient.

@ForestAtTheSea I think it's logical that AI would do the easier jobs first though.

However, things like digital twinning are used in more dangerous jobs, I think. So for example, if you see that nobody has come along to fix a water leak in the road, it will be because the digital twinning technology sensors will be operated elsewhere and then (hopefully) your water supply will be restored. And no one had to dig a massive hole in the pavement and climb into it.

As far as I can see, they are using generative AI to complement stuff like that.

There's also technology that will assist in things like disaster recovery zones, to assess whether it's safe for a human to go in or not. I don't know if that comes under AI. I think again it's more a case of it gets enhanced by AI.

I'm not sure where it crosses over with robots, but have you seen the robots folding the laundry? The ones that are made to look like lamps. I find it interesting that it takes two of them to fold the laundry and they're quite slow.

to be honest at this point, anything that seems to be progressing more slowly than I expected, I take as a win. I really do not want a long life anyway, but I shudder to think what life is going to look like in 30 years.

I feel people's personalities have changed a lot already as a result of this. It depends what kind of person you are. It totally doesn't work for me. I realise a lot of people love it though.

Timely article by a philosopher:
https://unherd.com/2025/08/techno-politics-is-fuelling-public-anger/

"We’ve grown used to enormously wealthy tech entrepreneurs acting like they are in the business of solving global problems. Peter Thiel recently recalled a conversation in which Musk and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, disagreed about whether making us an interplanetary species or building superhuman AI was “the most important project in the world”.

You might have thought that the most important project in the world would address some substantial threat to people’s safety and well-being, like the precipitous collapse of education at all levels, or the serious risk of civil war in Western nations. But superhuman AI and the quest to colonise space are expressions of a techno-politics that aims not to mend the world, but simply to leave it behind."

Ironic that a thread about AI is littered with grammar and spelling errors that either (a) it failed to pick up or (b) it autocorrected incorrectly.

I was thinking that as well.
If you want to sell manufacturer's machinery or a car or medication, everything needs to go through safety testing. Different fields have different standards. On top of that, different countries have varying legislation which needs to be fulfilled before something can go on the market.
Lots of items are completely forbidden (plastic straws, toys for babys with detachable tiny parts...) or only available in specific settings, such as chemicals or medication.
AI was set into motion with almost no guardrails, and those who are affected have to take measures after the problem already happened - such as all artists whose work was used in training, people in fake videos / posts are just few examples.

Fake material is now so widespread I would class it as guerilla terrorism by the program creators and releasing companies.

When you can't trust the news, and the news media cannot trust anyone of their contributors, people can unleash heaps of trouble on anyone without reason by generating fake material.
Sure, there was fraud and fake videos or photos before, but the difference is the sheer relentless amount and that it is open to anyone.

Depending on the training material, there is also a lot of inbuilt bias.

Our politicians were incredibly shortsighed and not that bright to permit this software onto the market without any regulation. Yes, the EU is talking about a few things here and there, but it's late and not coherent. The problem is already there.

Additionally, the promise was that AI would help in workplaces which include heavy manual labor, are tough on the body, such as patient care (lifting patients, for example), tough mining work, waste collection, and similar, which also have problems with hiring workforce. Instead AI starts cutting into the office and creative work first.

There should be more focus on using AI or automation in areas where there is a problem retaining workforce or the work is dangerous or often leads to health problems. This can be done by legislation and agreements with the tech companies.

It's also stupid to de-skill oneself. Sure, ChatGPD can do your homework, but you won't have learned anything.

Regarding the environmental impact, Meta & Co are planning mini nuclear reactors to power their servers, so much energy is required.

I was very surprised to speak to a group of teenagers who are pissed off with AI

This was a volunteering thing this weekend

I don't really use it if I can possibly avoid it. But I think the fact that it gets a lot of things wrong is an issue. I have had people working in IT tell me that a lot of the problems at the moment are due to things being rolled out before they're actually ready. And certainly not properly tested.

It doesn't feel new to me because I saw some early version in 2016 with a client. I can't remember which programme it was.

But I am surprised that more people aren't just generally irritated by it.

I don't know, maybe no one says so because you get accused of being a Luddite.

It's really inconvenient though, if apps are the only app for payment. Some people don't have smartphones. I do, but mine is old and not compatible with apps. You might not have internet, or might run out of data. If you're abroad you might find issues with getting your app to accept your payment card.

This woman won her case eventually, but only after fighting back.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2k0qlpjgk2o

I’m 47. And married to an IT Consultant who feels the same about AI as me.

The upside is that he has never been more in demand from companies that have sacked developers in favour of AI-generated code which doesn’t work and needs someone with the skills to find the issue and fix it.

I work in a completely person-to-person field. The in-authentic nature of AI-generated communication sets my hair on end. It may be able to replicate (to a degree) head, but it struggles with heart and I just disengage. Recently looking for some info to help my teenage ND daughter on a forum I’ve been on for years, and know the people and the names etc and was reading a post about a facet of ADHD. It was awkward and I double checked who had posted it - long established poster that I’ve interacted with many times. Directly underneath was a second post which said “I generated this article using co-pilot. The prompt I used was………”. I was so disappointed and disengaged from the discussion immediately. I don’t go there to see what AI thinks of something. I go in search of loved experiences and feedback from professionals in the field.

I suspect the person that said she’d love to see me being really dramatic is undoubtedly younger as I’m 67 and can place changes into a realistic context. Having worked with mainly much younger people, many with a university education, I was always aghast at how the couldn’t add a column of figures, use punctuation correctly and so on. I recognise that the need for (grammar school) punctuation is dwindling but imagine a catastrophic cyber outage - where would commerce be once the battery on an old calculator had run out? A silly and simple example but think on. We’re placing power in the hands of a few.

If properly used, with lengthy trials to ensure it’s getting it right, it has a lot of potential.

BUT - it’s introduced with barely a flicker of checking, but cash strapped organisations, who barely understand it. No one checks algorithms, looks for bias, or ever thinks about whether the outcomes are legally compliant. And there’s no time or funding to do so.

its also incredibly environmentally unfriendly.

Meta openly admits to me that it is data mining!
ChatGPT is very US-centric and gets many localised questions that I ask it completely wrong. In addition its European geography is pathetic, ask it for recommendations for somewhere in city x to have lunch and a) it does not clarify which city x (there are 2 in the country, where I live) and b) either makes suggestions for places that are not open at lunch time, or tries to suggest somewhere 300km away. It is also both patronising and sycophantic in annoyingly equal measures, but does not know what ODFOD means :-)

“Second-hand thinkers”.

(slightly less offensive than the alternative “promptitutes” descriptor!)

Me too. End times for human intelligence, at least.

Why oh why did MN do away with that laughing emoji!!?!

Well it’s neo-Luddism and has been around since the 90s. People have been saying the same about all manner of technological advances for hundreds of years.

Not saying you're wrong, but we simply can't stop it, any more than people a few decades ago could stop the advent of the internet and email and the fact that if they didn't learn to use them, they wouldn't have jobs. We are going to have to learn to use it and to manage the risks

"Anything that's invented before you're born is just a natural and normal part of how the world works. Anything invented between your birth and when you're 35 is exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things." - Douglas Adams

Certainly rings true for me. Had a smartphone at about 35 and thought it was awesome and have thought that pretty much everything that's come along since is just overcomplicating things.