Good Work to Our Artificial Friends

She was sitting near the fire. Outside it was cold, inside there was that orange light that only small-town houses have. I pulled out my phone and said: “Monastera, I need to ask you some questions.”

She looked at the phone with the same suspicion she looks at everything she doesn’t understand — but which, in the end, she accepts.

Monastera is almost sixty years old, she teaches kindergarten in Vallesaccarda, a town of a few thousand residents in the province of Avellino. She is my mother. And she is the first interviewee of AI di Provincia.

”They are replacing humans, basically.”

When I asked her what she thinks artificial intelligence is, she answered without hesitation: “That humans are being replaced, basically.”

She hasn’t read academic papers. She doesn’t follow tech newsletters. But she hit exactly the fear that keeps even the best researchers in the world awake at night.

She heard about AI for the first time at school — not as a student, but as a teacher, during a professional development course. This says it all: artificial intelligence has reached even the classrooms of a town in Irpinia, not as a tool, but as a topic to be managed.

The AI she already uses without knowing it

When I told her she probably already uses AI every day — in her cell phone, in maps, in the news that reaches her on WhatsApp — she paused for a second.

“It surprises me, because I don’t know how I use it.”

It is the most honest answer I could have received. She doesn’t use it consciously: she is subjected to it, like most people. The difference is that she at least admits it.

The children who already surpass her

The most interesting part came when she talked about her work. She teaches the youngest children, the ones in kindergarten. And she told me something that struck me:

“The children are already very good with these technological tools. So the school must always propose new things. It’s hard to manage: I would like some help.”

A kindergarten teacher in a provincial town asking AI for help to keep up with four-year-old children. If that isn’t the perfect synthesis of the moment we are living in, I don’t know what else is.

”It is something bigger than us”

Her fears are concrete, not abstract. She saw a report on TV about unmanned military aircraft. It scared her. “There is the power, the enormous potential that this artificial intelligence has, which could be poured over us.”

Then she added something simple and true: “It is something bigger than us, in my opinion.”

It’s not catastrophism. It is lucidity.

”I would like to go back to the Eighties”

When I asked her what she would ask AI if she could ask just one thing, she paused for a long time. Then she answered laughing: “I would like to go back to the Eighties.”

I told her that maybe it’s not possible, but she could see her photos from back then animated, brought to life. She lit up for a second — then added, still laughing: “Or at least remain this age for as long as possible.”

In that laugh lies all the distance between what AI can do and what people truly want.