There are times these days when more and more I feel like Wilma, Fred’s wife in the The Flintstones.

Fred and Wilma were, of course, early humans, a cave-living, meat-loving, rock-splitting, animal skin-wearing Stone Age couple whose lives were focused on rearing little daughter Pebbles and controlling the antics of their pet dinosaur Dino, while interacting in the best sitcom style with neighbours Barney and Betty Rubble.

The humour, of course, was all about the anachronism of placing the modern day plotlines of a 20th century suburban family into a prehistoric setting... washing machines are run by animals, cars – very unwieldy contraptions made of stone – are powered by people running inside them. Fred operates a brontosaurus digger in his quarry workplace.

Very funny. But not so much, perhaps, when you cast yourself as the Stone Ager in an increasingly bewildering world where so many aspects of life are coming to be dominated by artificial intelligence, a technology that within a decade – a half-decade even, if AI optimists are to be believed – will utterly transform the way we live our lives and interact with the world.

How soon will it be before I experience a technological and social revolution so all-encompassing in terms of the way we live, work, think, create, imagine and engage with businesses, shops, health services and government, that I feel illiterate, perhaps even obsolete and therefore useless?

I’m old enough to have survived as the world took a sharp turn off that laneway with grass growing in the middle, where people signed paper documents, letters were physical things that arrived in the post, and you had to wait years for a landline, and roared onto what Tony Blair used to call the ‘information superhighway.’

And so we all transitioned to email and banking and shopping online and being contactable and connected 24/7 thanks to our smartphones. 

Yes, it was tough for some, but most of us got there and became perfectly functional as our word processors morphed into computers and then laptops and smartphones. 

Yes, we’re all now online and complain all the time that we’d like to talk to a person rather than a recorded message telling us which button to press, but we figured it out and we adapted and have even thrived. 

Technology has become a wonderful tool, but ultimately humans remain in charge.

But this change feels more fundamental. Feels more final. Previous technological shifts felt evolutionary. This is like a metamorphosis and if you don’t adapt you face extinction – you’ll be left behind. Cut off from the species.

This creeping sense of lo-fi dread overwhelms me, but should I really be so anxious? Is it too sensationalist to fear an almost existential threat from AI? After all, people use it in their personal lives already and are loving the benefits.

What’s not to like about carefully instructing a computer programme in what you want to say in a complex letter, from the content right down to the tone and attitude, and have it produce a piece of perfection way beyond your own ability in a matter of seconds?

What’s wrong with asking your friendly butler Claude or ChatGPT to come up with a dozen interior design ideas for your home with photographs of the actual rooms adorned with furnishings, wallpapers and colour schemes you express a preference for, suggesting brands you can source locally and within a specified budget? Who needs an interior designer – or even a friend with a good eye?

Isn’t it great you can accurately colour old photos to bring memories alive, create cartoons, spreadsheets, shopping lists, plan meals, budget for the household, ask your computer for a holiday itinerary with suggested hotels, all of which are exactly tailored to your taste?

Even better, you can request your AI friend to scour the internet’s most accurate sources to find out what’s wrong with your creaky knees or better still, discover why your brain power is diminishing and your emotional spectrum narrowing because you never exercise those ‘leetle grey cells’ by thinking and computing yourself – or even talk, laugh and cry with actual people any more.

On the surface, all of the above are just the silly bits of AI, the toys we can play with for nothing (at the moment). But as inevitably as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X have done over the past couple of decades, soon AI programs will become indispensable.

As innocuous as it appears, the AI that’s been made available to the general public already feels like a technological revolution on steroids – and taken to its ultimate conclusion, has to be a threat to what it means to be human.

‘If you don’t use it, you lose it’ is the mantra that rules our ability to maintain both our physical and mental capacity. Our unquestioning willingness to cede our own intelligence to that of an AI program must inevitably degrade the way we problem-solve.

It must erode our ability to compute, undermine our own research skills and critical thinking, dislocate our relationship with reality because we are no longer required to practice any basic skills, disrupt our interpersonal relationships as we rely on friendly, empathetic bots for advice and good counsel and, as we descend deeper into the algorithmic rabbit hole, define our view of the wider world.

A world where the answers to every individual’s everyday challenges arrive easy-peasy, cooked and ready to eat on a plate, must have far-reaching effects on the very nature of who we are, yet we seem prepared to ignore the potential consequences and, almost unquestioningly, carry on regardless. 

We know nothing about how any of this stuff works, who controls it, if it has inherent biases, the potential for it have a consciousness of its own, or if it compromises our own privacy, yet some people are offering up their most personal information without giving it a second thought.

Did we learn nothing from the detrimental effects of social media, particularly on children, and the lack of regulation of the tech giants that is only now being addressed, and in a very paltry way at that?

And this is just the small stuff.

The real impact of AI – on jobs, lifestyles, politics, democracy, social justice, business, the law, health, medicine, science, war and ultimately our very existence – will go to the very core of what it means to be human.

And that’s not me saying it, it’s the view of the head of one of the most important companies developing AI at the moment, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who believes that AI ‘is the biggest thing that ever happened to humanity’.

And before I get cast as ‘a doomer’ – or to use a term from the industrial revolution, a Luddite – Stone Age tech dunce that I am, of course I can see the good in aspects of AI.

Amodei himself trained as a biologist and is convinced that, given its ability to work ‘at peak human performance’ AI – if we can scale it up to create ‘a nation of 100 million AI geniuses working at peak performance’ and deploy them in basic research – will find cures for cancers, MS, Parkinson's and a whole host of other diseases plaguing our lives within a far quicker timescale than human endeavour alone ever could.

AI has also proven itself brilliant at analysing X-rays and scans, in diagnostics, within pharma companies to create new medicines. It has also shown its worth in analysing business models and legal strategies, seeing patterns and information that humans will never spot... the list of its potential is as long as there are human activities and institutions.

The effects are already being felt in the workplace... and of course they are harmful to the weakest. Low level jobs have been shed in all the tech companies as they roll out AI. 

Legal firms and accountancy firms are using AI to produce and process the documents that entry-level white collar apprentices used to be hired for. The same thing is happening in recruitment, consulting, coding.

The speed at which it is being embraced within institutions – we see it in their help centres and their online data processing – is frightening. 

The technology is ready, it is only human ignorance and incompetence among those running businesses that is slowing down its rollout. As the benefits to profit margins become apparent, that will soon change and the tsunami will roar in.

It’s calculated as many as 50 per cent of all entry-level white-collar jobs will be gone within 10 years – as few as five if companies really lean into AI.

Our government’s response has been to tell people in vulnerable sectors to consider jobs such as electricians, carpenters and plumbers as safe bets in this workplace whirlpool.

And with new data centres being needed for AI, building them could well prove a temporary jobs haven for some.

Of course that doesn’t factor in the threat from AI-powered robots.... apparently the AI ‘brain’ end of them is already available – it’s the design of the physical robot that’s behind the curve.

AI minister Niamh Smyth assures us that we have a plan to counter all this, including being aware of the scale of the problem and providing upskilling for the ever-decreasing number of humans in charge of the AI. Why do I not feel confident?

(I might be more impressed if someone announced that a well-briefed AI model was going to be used to design and implement a fully integrated, privacy protected IT system for patient data across the entire health service, but obviously there is a slim chance of that. Or better still, design and build a Children’s Hospital – with robots.)

At the moment, AI isn’t even an integral part of the school curriculum. Teachers are urged to be aware of it and stay abreast of developments, and students must declare if any of their sources have been AI generated. So that’s a tick in the future-proofing box.

If the AI giants are to be believed, we’re talking single years to prepare measures to help people adapt to the tumultous social change coming at us.

Fail to do that and the resulting unrest and violence is utterly predictable. Indeed, far right parties across Europe have been found to use AI-generated material to discredit political opponents over immigration and race relations.

The aim is to foment social discontent and spark violent protest... we’ve seen a lot of that here. Elon Musk himself has proven that he finds no problem in spreading misinformation about immigration-related issues, quite apart from promoting AI for such hilarious purposes as ‘nudifying’ photographs of real people.

This is an industry with reported revenues of as much as a $1trillion (€872billion) a year, and it is pushing to make it impossible for any sector of society to manage without its technology.

The leaders of the companies developing AI are now central players in the geopolitical arena and their power to take away the very fundamentals of our humanity is chilling.

Given the use of AI for military purposes, the power to destroy life itself is even more nightmarish, especially as some autonomously-controlled AI drones are now an integral part of the US armoury.

All of this is here now – and already the leaders of some of the AI giants are talking about experimental AI models in their labs showing signs of having consciousness. Some have called for a pause on its development and use in society until a national and international legal framework catches up and tells the technology what it can and can’t do, rather than the other way round.

Some have called for a pause on its development and use within society until a national and international legal framework catches up, and tells the technology what it can and can’t do rather than the other way round.

So here I am. Overwhelmed. Do I engage with AI and get it to do all my mental heavy lifting and annex any creative spark I have left? Are the work prospects of myself and my family and friends jeopardised? 

Do I ignore it and carry on regardless, a 20th century anachronism in a world sublet to computer programs? Will I be able to do that, and still survive as a connected and functional citizen?

Somehow, all I can hear is the sound of an AI-generated deepfake Fred Flintstone calling me in... WILMAAAAAAAAA.