Francesca Rudkin: You'd be a mug to not use AI by now

So, this week I’m making a flying visit to Christchurch to help my son buy a car.   It’s taken a couple of months to find a part time job to support himself while studying, but he’s got one, and while he’s been making the most of public transport over the last year, with this job it would be much easier to have a car. I know, it’s not great timing. He’ll only be able to afford to drive to and from work.   But still, the search for a car began. We had pretty simple parameters when it came to age, km’s and cost - and after spending days looking at cars online I had a sizable list of possibilities. Yesterday, my partner and I sat down to wade through this list with the intention of comparing all the cars we’d found. But you know what - we had other things to do with our weekend so my partner said to me - let’s AI it. And then we giggled because AI is frowned upon in our household by, bizarrely, our tech savy, online loving children.   It took about 2 minutes for ChatGPT to assess the list of cars, and all their data from their listings to give me a comparative table. It looked at everything from the car’s year, its engine size, km's, fuel type, fuel consumption, safety rating, whether it had a current WOF and registration amongst other things. It summed it all up with a list of cars with the best fuel economy, safety and the best value when it comes to price vs km.   Then I got ChatGPT to list the top 5 picks out of all these cars to buy, and why. And which ones I should avoid, and why. It kindly also told me which order I should test drive them in.   Then to top off this very productive 5 minutes, ChatGPT offered me a NZ Used Car Inspection Checklist, which I was impressed with and accepted. Job done.   Here’s the thing. We’d done the hard work in finding these cars - we probably should have used AI for that too - but at least we’d learnt quite a bit as we went. Yes, we probably would have come to very similar conclusions, and I would have written a similar checklist for myself, but it would have taken us hours.   “If you’re not using AI you’re a mug”, my partner said before heading outside to mow the lawns before the rain hit.  But are you a mug?   All this car hunting was being done under the disappointed gaze of our other child who believes AI is rotting our brains.   But AI is here. So where do you draw the line?   I find this question fascinating. I can’t help but click on articles about the threat and potential of AI. When implemented with a human focus AI has the potential to change lives for the better. When created with little regulation and for financial gain, the benefit for humans is harder to judge. It’s hard to celebrate productivity gains when it’s accompanied by layoffs, and with two kids in tertiary education I’m obsessed about what jobs AI is stealing. And yet as I saw yesterday, it can be a great way to make our lives easier. I like young people with strong opinions and their anti-AI stance, and I am more interested in continuing to grow my neural pathways than lessen them, so my use of AI will always be restrained. But I think my partner is right - you’d be a mug to ignore it. Understanding and being able to use AI is going to be as necessary as being able to type was once upon a time.   AI was not used in the writing of this editorial. You can probably tell!  LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.