South Wales Evening Post column, February 28, 2025
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that an elderly man in possession of a mobile phone will get himself into deep trouble. Jane Austen never had trouble with predictive text and baffling text abbreviations when she was writing Pride and Prejudice. And I hate to think how her masterpiece would have turned out if she’d had the ‘help’ of Artificial Intelligence (AI). At my senior age, I’m hoping someone invents a mobile phone that just does voice calls and allows for a spellchecker that stops me making stupid mistakes in messages. The tech giant Apple updated my phone with AI this week. Did I ask for it? No. Will it help me? I have no idea. It’s a fair bet that my three-year-old grand-daughter will have a better idea of how it all works. Meanwhile, I am saddled with a phone which bleeps six times an hour with ‘notifications’ and which still doesn’t stop me from putting a totally inappropriate ‘x’ at the end of messages to my plumber! There is, of course, some comfort to be taken in t...