Decades ago, they promised us robot butlers and flying cars. We’ve settled for Alexa (often as helpful as a deaf grandmother), Roombas, and self-driving Cybertrucks. I wonder if the Jetsons and other prominent futurists of the last century will be spinning in their graves?
Whimsy and sarcasm aside, as a sci-fi fan it is beginning to feel like that future is finally arriving. Modern life is awash with technology, with touchscreens and voice control giving us unprecedented access to the collected repository of knowledge (and ignorance) that is the World Wide Web. But that can be overwhelming to navigate, full of pitfalls and rabbit holes, and quite off-putting for some.
AI feels like the final piece of the Information Age puzzle. Far from being a tech barrier, AI chatbots are the accessible interface to the internet which shortcuts a lot of the barriers, filters out the noise, and packages the raw information found in a very consumable and personable way.
Only a few months ago, I was something of a never-AI luddite. As someone who takes pride in the written word, I’ve spent a lifetime learning how to shape prose, thinking about how a sentence flows, and whether to use the Oxford comma (like the one I just used). Now AI enables anyone to produce flawless copy, which feels like it renders my lifetime of slow progress as time wasted. I find myself considering leaving in typos and bad grammar habits like a stylistic fingerprint, or consoling myself that AI couldn’t have done it unless we did it first.
Nonetheless, the march of progress is inevitable and I’ve come around to the value of using AI tools, both at work and at home. I’ll be documenting work-related projects elsewhere, but I thought it may be of interest to document the small ways AI tools have helped at home.
- I created a tailored 7-day family meal plan and shopping list
By describing each family member’s preferences and health requirements, I was able to quickly develop a healthy and accessible meal plan which included manageable recipes to accommodate someone with a low-carb preference, another with a low-fat preference, and a fussy vegetarian. The result can be reviewed and amended, then output as a shopping list for ordering online. If Ocado et al aren’t already providing this service on their websites, they’re missing a trick. - I fixed my tumble dryer with a single prompt
My tumble dryer was malfunctioning. Lights were flashing, alarms were beeping. I’m sure I could have found the solution by downloading the manual or trawling through forums, but this was much quicker. One prompt elicited several step-by-step fixes to try. The first suggestion worked. - Solved a long-standing Wi-Fi connection issue
My old Now TV Roku set-top box frequently forgets or refuses to connect to our home Wi-Fi. I described the issue to ChatGPT and it successfully diagnosed the issue then walked me through steps to permanently resolve it. The set-top box was getting tripped up by our 5Ghz Wi-Fi, so I gave it a metaphorical tinfoil hat (I changed the 5Ghz SSID). As a side benefit, the AI-recommended process also gave the knowledge to do a better job of remotely managing the kids’ TV time – sorry kids, no more sneaking downstairs to watch YouTube at 6am. - I developed a simulated tournament environment that let me test wargame rules
I know this one is a bit niche, but it’s the best example I’ve experienced so far of the sheer complexity of what AI tools can do. I was able to prompt ClaudeAI to provide entertaining blow-by-blow commentary of fictionalised conflicts between military units using complex tabletop wargame rules. It was quite a recursive rabbit hole which involved prompting Claude to generate its own guidance documentation and revision safeguards, but it was a fascinating experiment. - Using AI tools to develop websites and games
Admittedly, I’ve only dabbled here, but as well as supporting my wife’s nascent counselling enterprise by building a website in minutes using proprietary AI tools on GoDaddy, I’ve used ChatGPT and Grok to produce a design document for making a video game from a board game we invented. That’s very much as far as we’ve got with it at this point, but the generated guidance is comprehensive and the next step in creating a videogame now seems very accessible. - Curating projects and generating audio ‘podcast’ summaries
Google’s NotebookLM has been a revelation to me for working with and reviewing personal projects. Both my current AI-generated career pivot and my still unpublished novel given the NotebookLM video overview treatment is mind-bogglingly clever.
Of course I recognise there are challenges to overcome; human misuse and overuse, AI misinterpretation and ‘hallucinations’, copyright and ethical concerns, and broader socio-economic and philosophical issues.
But I’m already convinced there are a myriad small ways that AI can help us and build a better future. I’m ready to embrace it. Are you?
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My pledge: No article written here will be planned, written, or edited by AI. This will always be a place for my thoughts, words and typos. Any AI-generated content will be labelled clearly as such.
[The images for this article were generated by Copilot and Grok-Imagine with the prompt: ‘Generate header art for an article entitled ‘The Value of AI at Home’ whose opening paragraph is <opening paragraph provided>.]