AI is expanding fast – but won’t replace spiritual needs

I have a friend who is a computer wizard, and who tells me that Artificial Intelligence is developing apace – bigger, faster and more widespread with every month that passes – and I should get more involved with AI programmes.

Its use increased by 61% across all countries in 2025. The growth is accelerating in quantum leaps and smart folk are committing to it – the Chinese invested $48 billions in AI last year alone.

Users

The generation aged 15-24 are now the most active users of Artificial Intelligence, and ChatGPT is the magical learning assistant driving this use.

ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer Technology) was only launched in 2022, but already it’s the biggest thing since sliced bread. It helps with writing, coding, story-telling, learning concepts, brainstorming and it’s said to be so superintelligent – so hyperintelligent – that no human brain can possibly match its operations.

Resistance is futile. AI is moving into every sphere of our lives, and if I’m honest, I have resorted to it myself – it’s brilliant at retrieving data”

At this point of being urged to engage more fully with such tekkie panjandrums I begin to feel slightly resentful, or perhaps even jealous of this superintelligent, hyperintelligent presence.

When I consider with what gradual progress and long attention to detail I have acquired what little knowledge I possess, it seems insulting and even unjust that mere machines can outdo anything I can muster.

Le mot juste

The French writer Gustave Flaubert would ponder for a week over finding the right word – “le mot juste” – for his prose, and in my humble way, I’ve tried to emulate that exercise. But now AI will find ‘le mot juste’ in a nano-second. It can translate all of Flaubert too, super-quickly.

Resistance is futile. AI is moving into every sphere of our lives, and if I’m honest, I have resorted to it myself – it’s brilliant at retrieving data. How many potatoes are consumed in Belarus? Does Ireland get more rain than Norway? AI can deliver answers pronto.

It sure is alarming how speedily we are moving into a world dominated by AI, and I suppose I’ll have to sign up to the likes of ChatGPT.

Yet I still believe that what is uniquely human will always remain supreme. We may even come to cherish what is human even more, in contrast to the cold artificiality of the efficient robot.

And I believe the religious instinct which is part of our humanity will survive and even flourish in an AI world – precisely because faith nourishes the spirit, which no robot can reach.

The more the world is led by artificial power, the more people will need the human and spiritual dimensions. That’s some consolation.

 

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A mother’s responsibility

 

I first became aware of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor when he was born, in 1960.  I was working as a teenage waitress in a long-gone, organic restaurant in Dublin’s St Stephen’s Green called ‘The Country Shop’. One of my fellow-workers was a friendly, rather proper Protestant girl from Tyrellspass, Co. Westmeath, who had visited London the previous autumn.

She’d been shocked to see newspaper posters flaunting the headline “The Queen – Pregnant!”.  This was a word not considered decorous in the public realm at the time (“expecting” was the acceptable alternative – my own mother thought “pregnant” only suited to the cow and the sow.)

But here was Elizabeth II publicly ‘preggers’. This was baby Andrew, whom his mother called “adorable”, though she was not given to mumsey emotions. In the light of his fall from grace, she is being blamed, retrospectively, for indulging him, and for exercising the ‘gentle parenting’ that can slide into spoiling.

I asked the royal biographer Robert Hardman, author of Charles III, if Elizabeth was to blame, as a mother, for Andrew’s odious conduct? “No. He constantly pulled the wool over her eyes. He’d visit her on a Sunday when the equerries were off, and bamboozle her with blandishments.” And she’d always believe his version of events.

Maybe she was indulgent, and many a mother has done likewise. Yet the tribe of mothers might be slow to blame a dead monarch for a 66-year-old man’s sins and errors. Individuals need to take responsibility for themselves.

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President Macron’s administration is sending letters to French 29-year-olds alerting them to the reality that their fertility will begin to decrease as their thirties proceed – so it might be wise to think of having a baby soon.

There’s much concern that deaths in France now outnumber births, and the country has just recorded the lowest birth rate since 1917.

Surely the biological facts around fertility should simply be taught as part of sex education?

Meanwhile, in Japan, according to the author Tom Feiling, young people are shunning marriage and children, so villages and rural areas are deserted. Dwellings are left empty since there’s no one to inherit the properties.

Consequently, the new prime minister Sanae Takaicchi has promised more incentives for families and support for women as mothers.

Expect an expanding awareness of the demographic crisis internationally.