Street art in a Melbourne alleyway
In the face of potential annihilation by AI, Chris and I went shopping with my mother. What else do you do when the media is saying AI might kill us all in the next decade? It’s too big a problem for me to have any traction on, let alone contemplate!
To be honest, I’m not as worried by the potential for annihilation as for disappearance of all my money, amongst other digital services. Until AI has much better control of physical matter in the absence of humans, it’s more likely to be an AI accident that will exterminate humans, rather than a deliberate AI move. Of course, we could also be extincted (no, it’s not a real word) by humans using AI to e.g. create a plague, attack another country’s digital systems, or launch weapons. But humans using AI is nothing newer than humans using nuclear bombs.
What I’d really like to know right now is how air-gapped banking systems are? If banking systems are hacked into by AI there will be Problem 1, when you can’t access your money. But then could come Problem 2, when no one knows how much money you have because the banking systems have been destroyed. That could be a bad one…
Anyhow, we weren’t dwelling on all these existential crises, we were shopping. Shopping is what you do when it’s your mother’s 93rd birthday and shopping is one of her current favourite activities. Shopping is also a good thing to do when it’s not one of your own favourite activities – you know you are giving a genuine present when it’s nothing would like. So off we went to Westfield Riccarton.
I probably shouldn’t admit that, when Westfield Riccarton was established, I thought it was ‘Westfield’ because it was the westernmost shopping complex in Christchurch. Later I discovered Westfield is a brand launched in Australia in 1960 and now used for 80 shopping centres in Australia, New Zealand, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States.
At Westfield we went to Skechers looking for shoes. The shop assistant brought out a variety of sizes of ten different shoes, trying to find shoes that comfortably fit someone with lower leg swelling and which are easy to slip on. A brainwave from Chris got us looking at the men’s shoes, which were wider sizes. Then he bought Mum a comfortable pair of brown slip ons for her birthday.
Adjacent to Westfield is Diva Fashions, one of Mum’s favourite clothes shops in recent years. Jeanette and Judy run a shop that takes care of their customers and we spent a good hour there while they found Mum lots of options in tops and trousers and gave her time and space to consider each. Trying on trousers in the store was a bit hard, given Mum is in a wheelchair, so Jeanette let her take multiple sizes home on the basis we could return whichever pairs didn’t fit.
The net result was Mum happily wearing her new outfit when we visited today for her birthday and took her to the retirement village café for a lemon poppyseed muffin and a coffee. That café is the best thing the retirement village ever did. It’s always full of village inmates and their guests, and the staff know the retirees by name and their favourite drink.
Walking down the street after we saw Mum, I said to Chris, “You know what’s the best thing about taking an older person shopping?” Chris looked at me as if I was insane; he might like shopping even less than I do.
“The best thing about shopping with an older person is it restores your faith in humans. It was so nice to see the shop assistants taking lots of time, paying attention, and caring for Mum.”
Next time you feel the world’s an increasingly threatening place, I suggest you take an older person shopping. It’s amazing how it can improve your mood!
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