Áilín Quinlan: Would you pay someone else to decorate your home for Christmas?

Oh, what would I give?

To come home from work to find the house transformed into a childhood Christmas fantasy.

To walk in the door and see a tall, dignified Christmas tree in the hall, a Christmas tree that I did not have to purchase, haul home, erect and decorate.

To dreamily gaze at a staircase elegantly draped in great, thick, forest-green swags bedecked in red and gold bows that I did not have to struggle with.

To put a match to the fire and watch the flames leap beneath a mantelpiece wreathed in glowing fir garlands sprinkled with red Christmas berries and frosted pine-cones that I had nothing to do with.

To walk through doors professionally festooned with wreaths and festive bows?

I’d give anything.

Anything.

True; the end result of Christmas decorating is often blissful.

It’s also true that the job itself can be murderous, time-consuming, tiring and frustrating, even when you did your utmost the previous year to put away the festive lights and decorations tidily and carefully.

The question is, though: would you fork out in the region of €550 a day plus VAT for somebody else to decorate your house for Christmas?

Would you pay someone €8 for every one of the 80 or so decorations they hang on your impressively deluxe tree?

Or, and here the mind boggles, would you pay the guts of anything from €3,000 to €30,000 for a full Christmas-time internal/external fit-out of your house?

For someone to source all of your decorations, including several Christmas trees and a beautiful fireplace display?

To provide “supplementary fresh foliage,” external decorations and personalised stockings for the children.

Would I pay for all or any of that?

Not in a month of Sundays, baby.

‘Tis a long way from “supplementary fresh foliage” I was reared.

It was more a case of “here’s the wash-basket; go out and bring me in a few bits of ivy from the garden to hang over the pictures.”

But would YOU pay it?

Because some people in what are reportedly perfectly normal households in absolutely normal Irish housing estates, are doing just that.

Home styling is in, homeboy.

One decorator declared that it was nothing to do with showing off – sometimes families were short of time, she said, sometimes they were hosting a special Christmas or sometimes clients were older or physically unable to decorate.

Who are we to judge.

Especially those Grinches among us, who would rather pull out our own eyeballs than pay someone to, er, come in and sprinkle a bit of fake snow around the place.

But outsourcing traditional chores is becoming part of life.

It’s been years since the owner of a toyshop told me that he had to hire extra personnel in the run-up to Christmas because so many young fathers were now unable to assemble toys like train-sets, ride-on bulldozers or bicycles.

It’s even longer since we began to outsource home cooking to the global food industry (which is why we are so fat and so unhealthy.)

We’ve outsourced even the simplest mental maths to calculators.

We’ve outsourced map-reading to Google Maps and basically dispensed with developing a sense of direction.

Believe it or not, it’s only about three years since ChatGPT was released to the public.

Now it’s used for everything from drafting emails and doing research to generating ideas and solving problems.

What’s that doing to our brains, do you think?

Now, ponder a moment on the guys who built the pyramids. Or the Forbidden City. Or Machu Picchu. About the sheer skill and problem-solving involved in that.

Now think about modern, college-educated builders and engineers. And what they’d do if they lost their calculators or the internet collapsed.

A good example is the air industry.

As automation increasingly takes over, pilots are (understandably - to a point) being trained less in manual control. The problem is when things go pear-shaped and a concept called the “Startle Effect” comes into play.

This is where pilots experience confusion and shock when, after operating on autopilot for a long time, the automation fails and they’re suddenly forced to rely on their own skills and training. Wouldn’t you love to be on that plane.

Some 42 per cent of Irish adults and, on a global level, more than a billion people, are now regularly using AI tools.

Increasingly things we’d have done ourselves such as writing, planning, research or problem solving are being handed over to AI.

It’s just all so convenient, isn’t it?

But is it possible that our brains might, eh, be getting a bit lazy and slow from lack of use?

What’s the chance of the Startle Effect happening to us someday if there’s an IT crash and we cannot cope because we’re so habituated to not using our brains?

It’s a mere hop skip and jump from where we are now to a point where we really believe we’re incapable of doing anything for ourselves, either because we believe we could do nothing as well as artificial intelligence, or because we simply don’t remember how to even try anymore.

Research released by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last June showed that study participants showed less brain activity when they relied on ChatGPT to solve problems.

Which of course suggests that all this massively convenient AI assistance may come at a cognitive cost, and I quote, “diminishing users’ inclination to critically evaluate” what artificial intelligence is telling them.

Look around you.

Are we letting go of our traditional, hardy, give-it-a-go attitude?

Are we letting AI do too much of our thinking for us?

And logically, where is that going to leave us in the long term?