Old? Do not fear, your new best friend is here to help

It’s impossible to keep up these days. Lucky, then, that AI has the time and patience to teach us.

Okay. I admit it. I’ve turned into my mother. I am now as technophobic as she was; worse, if that’s possible. She refused to have a cellphone or use internet banking.

“I’m old,” my librarian-history teacher mum would say. “I’ve had a lifetime of learning, and I’m all out of brain capacity.” I’m tempted to say I know how she feels, but I know I’ll be lectured about how crucial it is to keep the brain active.

I’m constantly being told how dancing, doing crosswords, learning a language or learning to play the piano – learning complex new skills – help to develop new neural pathways that stave off dementia.

I have become the person I used to be contemptuous of – those who didn’t keep abreast of the times, who didn’t stay current, who allowed apathy, but mostly fear, to stop them from engaging with the world as it is now, rather than living in some backward-­looking bubble, harking back to what were “the good old days”. That’s me now, longing for the good old days. In my case, my good old days are not even that far in the past – maybe a dozen years or so.

In the past decade, technology has developed at such a rapid pace that it has needed a Herculean effort to keep up. I feel a little like Sisyphus, who pissed off the Greek god Zeus and was forever doomed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down when he reached the summit. Then he had to start all over again.

Technology. Argh. Just when I’ve mastered something, my devices update and I have to start learning all over again. I’ve just updated my Chrome account and it came with more upgrades than a bombardment of Temu specials. Microsoft Word resetting itself took away my carefully constructed library of contents – helpfully set up by a teenager – and I now don’t have easy access to my folders.

Don’t get me started on the last update on my iPhone, which has completely rearranged my picture library. I now have a slew of (useless to me) options – collections, memories, favourites, recently saved, maps, videos, featured photos – when all I want is a picture of the rhino and baby that’s somewhere in there, to replace my profile picture.

I put my Luddite behaviour down to more than the sheer terror of, like my lovely mother, having to learn and learn and relearn a new skill every few weeks. That’s exhausting and daunting in itself, yes. But it’s more than that; it’s about needing to have the courage to try new tech stuff without the constant dread that you’re going to break something, erase some crucial file or dispatch an essential document into the ether.

“You can’t hurt your computer,” a young man who was teaching me how to “cast” from my laptop to my television set told me.