When I Think About Using AI, I Think About Older People’s Homes

Because AI-lite, low-tech houses sound pretty sweet right about now

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When it comes to our adoption of AI in personal spaces, I think about old people a lot.

Specifically, old people’s homes. I think about the kitchens (my favourite place in the house) featured on Pasta Grannies or the Portuguese equivalent, Cozinha de Memórias.

Shows where old folk prepare traditional food in their traditional kitchens, built decades ago with nary an upgrade since. There are no AI-generated recipes here, and we love them for it — Pasta Grannies alone has over one million YouTube subscribers.

I also think about my parents and parents-in-law and their technologically challenged homes. They’ve not heard of ChatGPT, and my mum keeps calling AI “A-one” because that’s how she reads it in the paper.

My parents-in-law still listen to music exclusively via the radio, CDs and vinyl, never Spotify, and certainly not through an AI DJ. Perish the thought.

Honestly? Right now, their AI-lite, low-tech homes and lives look pretty good. Calmer. More peaceful.

At their age, they will probably never adopt AI in a big way. And I keep thinking — is that such a bad thing?

You could brush me off as a Luddite. A 40-year-old who isn’t up with the times and will get left behind, poor lass.

But think about this. We did not opt into AI. It was foisted upon us by mega-tech corporations that don’t exactly have a track record for having our best interests at heart. And the more it’s being incorporated into our lives, the more I wonder if I can opt out at least a little bit, please and thank you.

I’m specifically talking about how AI affects our personal lives. Being fed AI-generated videos on social media. Reading Google’s AI overview before getting into the actual search results. Reading fantastically popular online essays written by bots. It happens every single day, and I’m already exhausted by it.

There is a reason why shows like Pasta Grannies and Cozinha de Memórias are so popular — they remind us of times when technology wasn’t the epicentre of our lives. When AI wasn’t baked into everything, from WhatsApp to Google to TikTok videos.

I am not the only one questioning the pervasiveness of AI in personal spaces. Did you know only 11% of Americans are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily lives? Did you know that less than half the global population trusts it?

Most notably, did you know that 60% of experts at colleges or universities have: “little to no confidence in US corporations to responsibly develop and use AI”?

It’s these sorts of stats that make me think back to older folk — the ones who are far more sceptical of AI than their younger counterparts. Just 18% of Boomers agree with the statement “I trust AI to be objective and accurate” compared to 49% of Gen Z, 50% of Millennials, and 35% of Gen X.

And I think about their tech-lite homes, the ones that look very, very attractive to me right now.

When was the last time you were truly happy in a moment?

For me, it was a couple of weeks ago, paddleboarding on a lake with my husband, brother and two nieces. We paddled out a couple of kilometres and sat on a rock eating sandwiches.

It was there, eating lunch, that I felt it, that feeling of complete and utter contentment. AI played no part in this moment. In fact, AI has played no part in any of my most contented moments of the last few years.

Later this week, I’ll head for a day or two to the winery where my husband is interning in the middle of the Portuguese countryside. I was there last year, too and it was one of the happiest times I’ve had in a while.

One of the reasons I love it so much is that there is hardly any internet and certainly no other tech. Instead, days are defined by processing grapes using old-school technology, eating local food and drinking local wine.

AI feels a world away when you are sitting with a gaggle of older Portuguese women responsible for picking our grapes, eating bifana sandwiches cooked on an ancient stove in the kitchen and drinking a few glasses of wine in dappled shade.

They might sound overly romantic, these moments. Unrealistic in our tech-heavy lives. Maybe you think the old ways will disappear. Maybe you think this is a good thing, and it’s naïve to think otherwise.

I don’t think it’s naïve to question anything in life. I think it’s necessary.

There is already a study (MIT, 2025) suggesting that LLMs harm learning and critical thinking abilities, especially for younger learners. And there is more than enough evidence about how connecting with nature improves happiness and health, whilst being chronically online is not so good for you.

The psychological effects of living in an AI-heavy world could fill a whole other article (and then some) but I listened to a podcast today with neuroscientist T.J Power, who nailed it (lightly edited for clarity):

It’s really important that as we become super robot humans that spend our lives looking at screens and social media and AI that we also remember these are the all the human activities that we like doing as well.

When we go on walks and hang out and sit on the sofa and talk to each other and socialise and eat food and exercise — all those things make us human. If someone keeps doing that, they’ll cruise through this AI-changed world we’re going into because their brain will say, well I’m still satisfied as a human.

But if you forget about all that human presence and you spend all of your life inside that new technology, the brain can’t cope with that. We’re not robots, we are human, at the end of the day.

So here’s a question for you. Will the adoption of AI in almost all areas of our lives really make us happier and more content? Or is there more happiness in hanging out with old Portuguese women in a winery where the internet hardly works?

More importantly, which one sounds more fun?

Culture expert Anne Helen Peterson recently theorised that: “AI is going to be deeply, devastatingly mid, but will wreck so much, and for so little.”

She’s not the only one. The Atlantic recently asked:

What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises?

I think about this a lot.

Don’t get me wrong, if AI can be harnessed for good in a wider sense, I’m all for it. If it can cure cancer or be used to detect disease before it takes hold, then that’s fantastic. If I were a software engineer and my life was made easier with a little AI-generated code, then great.

Our personal lives, however, are a different matter, as are our creative selves. We don’t need AI-generated slop. We certainly don’t need nudify apps or deep fakes that make us question what is real and what is not.

What we need is a little more peace. A little more calm. A few more of those beautiful contented moments which are rarely born from being immersed in an AI world.

A little technology can be a great thing, and AI could be a good thing if used responsibly.

But so can switching off the iPad and picking up a book instead. My 95-year-old Grandmother-in-law does that at the end of every single day, and it sounds rather lovely.

If they can do it, why can’t we?

At least some of the time.