Not a day goes by that my life is not touched by the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). From online chat bots acting like customer service agents, to asking it for a myriad of facts and ideas for my two kids (eight and five), AI has got its technical tendrils buried into the fabric of my daily life.
I hate how insidious and easy it all feels. As a writer, I hate how it has the potential to rob us of our creativity, ideas, and erase those beautiful and unique voices of ours. As a parent, I hate how my children will likely grow up asking an AI model for everything, from advice to inspiration, or maybe even for their relationships. As alien as that seems, recent research suggests that almost 10 per cent of adults in Ireland have had a ‘romantic relationship’ with an AI chatbot within the last 12 months.
Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes it feels like humanity is a lost cause or getting a bit too “Terminator-y” for my liking. While that’s likely just the movie nerd in me talking, images of that film franchise’s AI hive mind “Skynet” and its mission to wipe out what it perceives to be the problem – humans – keep playing in my head.
But something happened recently that’s made me realise that humans aren’t beyond redemption, and no matter how sophisticated AI gets or how much it may try to mimic human thinking and behaviour in the future, it will never be able to match the human spirit.
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Earlier this year, my two sons and I decided to put a simple message in a bottle and throw it into the sea, hoping that if we put some positive vibes out into the world, it might come back to us. Incredibly against all the odds, it did just that. In March, we got an unexpected reply to our message in a bottle email address, from the person who found it. While it only washed up a short distance from where we threw it in, we were overjoyed that our experiment worked. What’s more, the man who found it promised to throw it back into the sea for a second chance at adventure.
While we remained hopeful, we also knew the odds of the bottle going any further afield than Britain, if it wasn’t smashed on a rock or a boat, were slim. Yet, we couldn’t help but be excited by the prospect. Where a machine would likely see it as a calculation or odds too poor to consider, we three hopeful humans kept the possibility alive.
Months went by, and the bottle slipped from our minds, until a couple of weeks ago, when a message pinged into the inbox of the bottle’s email address.
“Dear young friend,” it began, and my heart skipped a beat. The email address is known to no one. It never even gets spam, so I knew this meant only one thing. Someone else had found it.
“I just received it this morning, the bottle was lying on the beach here on Zealand in Denmark. I have attached a map showing where it went ashore.
“My name is Henrik, I live in Hillerød, just 30km north of Copenhagen, with my wife Karina, we are both 53 years old.
“The bottle was found at Hyllingebjerg, a beautiful small beach near our summerhouse in Melby, when I was out for my morning swim.
“Over the next days the wind is from north or northwest. When it changes, I will ‘mail’ your bottle again in the water, exciting to see where it shows up next.
“I wish you all the best.”
I cannot describe the feeling of joy I felt. Just pure, silly, fresh, uncomplicated happiness at receiving the email. I ran upstairs and shared the news with my two boys, who couldn’t believe it either. We read and reread the message and brought up the Danish beach on Google Maps to explore further.
Almost instantly, the questions from my boys started. “How long of a journey is it Mum? Where could it go next? Will it end up in an iceberg at the North Pole and be found in a million years time?”
We all looked at each other in disbelief, the kids unable to comprehend the machines lack of understanding of their amazing feat
All valid questions I didn’t have answers to, so I opened an AI app and asked it to calculate how long of a journey the bottle had made.
At first, it kept giving us the route by land and ferry, which wasn’t what we wanted. When we tried to simply get the journey by sea, it kept going into all the caveats and complexities of such a journey.
We finally decided to explain and ask it how long it would take a message in a bottle to get from the beach in Bray, Co Wicklow, Ireland, to Hyllingebjerg in Denmark.
It replied: “The journey would be highly unpredictable; it would take a minimum of several years, but given the specific geography and currents, it’s more probable to be a multi-decade journey. The odds are extremely low. While not zero, the chances of the bottle making the entire journey unimpeded are highly improbable.”
We all looked at each other in disbelief, the kids unable to comprehend the machines lack of understanding of their amazing feat. Immediately, they told it that we had in fact done the impossible. It congratulated us, even though it felt like it didn’t quite believe us. Eventually, we worked out, the journey as the crow flies was about 1,500km.
It just showed us all that while AI will no doubt continue to embed itself into our lives, it’s never going to replace that inimitable human spirit or that indefinable magic that makes us so special.
