{"id":40263,"date":"2025-09-03T06:24:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T06:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/40263\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T06:24:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T06:24:06","slug":"months-went-by-the-message-in-a-bottle-slipped-our-minds-until-a-couple-of-weeks-ago-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/40263\/","title":{"rendered":"Months went by, the message in a bottle slipped our minds, until a couple of weeks ago \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not a day goes by that my life is not touched by the power of Artificial Intelligence<\/a> (AI). From online chat bots acting like customer service agents, to asking it for a myriad of facts and ideas for my two kids (eight and five), AI has got its technical tendrils buried into the fabric of my daily life.<\/p>\n

I hate how insidious and easy it all feels. As a writer, I hate how it has the potential to rob us of our creativity, ideas, and erase those beautiful and unique voices of ours. As a parent<\/a>, I hate how my children will likely grow up asking an AI model for everything, from advice to inspiration, or maybe even for their relationships. As alien as that seems, recent research suggests that almost 10 per cent of adults in Ireland have had a \u2018romantic relationship\u2019 with an AI chatbot within the last 12 months.<\/p>\n

Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes it feels like humanity is a lost cause or getting a bit too \u201cTerminator-y\u201d for my liking. While that\u2019s likely just the movie nerd in me talking, images of that film franchise\u2019s AI hive mind \u201cSkynet\u201d and its mission to wipe out what it perceives to be the problem \u2013 humans \u2013 keep playing in my head.<\/p>\n

But something happened recently that\u2019s made me realise that humans aren\u2019t beyond redemption, and no matter how sophisticated AI gets or how much it may try to mimic human thinking and behaviour in the future, it will never be able to match the human spirit.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, my two sons and I decided to put a simple message in a bottle and throw it into the sea<\/a>, hoping that if we put some positive vibes out into the world, it might come back to us. Incredibly against all the odds, it did just that. In March, we got an unexpected reply to our message in a bottle email address, from the person who found it. While it only washed up a short distance from where we threw it in, we were overjoyed that our experiment worked. What\u2019s more, the man who found it promised to throw it back into the sea for a second chance at adventure.<\/p>\n

While we remained hopeful, we also knew the odds of the bottle going any further afield than Britain, if it wasn\u2019t smashed on a rock or a boat, were slim. Yet, we couldn\u2019t help but be excited by the prospect. Where a machine would likely see it as a calculation or odds too poor to consider, we three hopeful humans kept the possibility alive.<\/p>\n

Months went by, and the bottle slipped from our minds, until a couple of weeks ago, when a message pinged into the inbox of the bottle\u2019s email address.<\/p>\n

\u201cDear young friend,\u201d it began, and my heart skipped a beat. The email address is known to no one. It never even gets spam, so I knew this meant only one thing. Someone else had found it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just received it this morning, the bottle was lying on the beach here on Zealand in Denmark<\/a>. I have attached a map showing where it went ashore.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy name is Henrik, I live in Hiller\u00f8d, just 30km north of Copenhagen, with my wife Karina, we are both 53 years old.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bottle was found at Hyllingebjerg, a beautiful small beach near our summerhouse in Melby, when I was out for my morning swim.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the next days the wind is from north or northwest. When it changes, I will \u2018mail\u2019 your bottle again in the water, exciting to see where it shows up next.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish you all the best.\u201d<\/p>\n

I cannot describe the feeling of joy I felt. Just pure, silly, fresh, uncomplicated happiness at receiving the email. I ran upstairs and shared the news with my two boys, who couldn\u2019t believe it either. We read and reread the message and brought up the Danish beach on Google Maps to explore further.<\/p>\n

Almost instantly, the questions from my boys started. \u201cHow long of a journey is it Mum? Where could it go next? Will it end up in an iceberg at the North Pole and be found in a million years time?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

We all looked at each other in disbelief, the kids unable to comprehend the machines lack of understanding of their amazing feat<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All valid questions I didn\u2019t have answers to, so I opened an AI app and asked it to calculate how long of a journey the bottle had made.<\/p>\n

At first, it kept giving us the route by land and ferry, which wasn\u2019t what we wanted. When we tried to simply get the journey by sea, it kept going into all the caveats and complexities of such a journey.<\/p>\n

We finally decided to explain and ask it how long it would take a message in a bottle to get from the beach in Bray<\/a>, Co Wicklow<\/a>, Ireland, to Hyllingebjerg in Denmark.<\/p>\n

It replied: \u201cThe journey would be highly unpredictable; it would take a minimum of several years, but given the specific geography and currents, it\u2019s more probable to be a multi-decade journey. The odds are extremely low. While not zero, the chances of the bottle making the entire journey unimpeded are highly improbable.\u201d<\/p>\n

We all looked at each other in disbelief, the kids unable to comprehend the machines lack of understanding of their amazing feat. Immediately, they told it that we had in fact done the impossible. It congratulated us, even though it felt like it didn\u2019t quite believe us. Eventually, we worked out, the journey as the crow flies was about 1,500km.<\/p>\n

It just showed us all that while AI will no doubt continue to embed itself into our lives, it\u2019s never going to replace that inimitable human spirit or that indefinable magic that makes us so special.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not a day goes by that my life is not touched by the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI).…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,945,382,18,2215,19,17,2973,82,946],"class_list":{"0":"post-40263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-bray","12":"tag-denmark","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-for-you","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-parenting","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-wicklow"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}