Trevor Laffan: I’m a tech dinosaur, my smart TV is far too smart for me...

I have always been an avid reader. As a child, I walked to the library on Saturday mornings to change my books and looked forward to going to bed at night for a read.

I could easily get lost in whatever I was reading at the time, and enjoy the adventure as if I was actually there.

That was probably just as well as there wasn’t much else going on in the form of entertainment for kids in those days. It was the 1960s after all, so we had to make our own fun and all we had was our imagination. Essential if you were pretending your piece of stick was a gun in the game of cowboys and Indians.

It doesn’t seem that long ago to me, but it is 60 years, and the world is a much different place now. It’s changing so fast, I sometimes struggle to keep up. Particularly when it comes to technology.

I use a laptop computer, but my technical expertise is limited. I can plug it in and I’m very efficient at turning it on and off. Apart from that, I have absolutely no idea what makes it tick, and I have no desire to find out either.

I have had my current machine a long time, ten years in fact, which they tell me is longer than these things normally survive for. It’s starting to slow down a bit, so I reckon time is running out for my faithful friend. It might be preparing itself for laptop heaven, which is fine. It owes me nothing.

Trying to find a replacement is going to cause me a headache though.

At the moment, I’m using a Dell and my previous one was the same make. They’ve served me well and if I could just walk into a store and get the same again, I would, but unfortunately, I can’t because I’m told my model is now obsolete.

That means I have to go to a store and get advice from the people who speak in tongues, and I won’t have a clue what they’re talking about.

They’ll tell me about processors, Intel Core 5-120U with 8 GB DDR5 and 16” Non-Touch FHD.

I will be assured what they’re trying to sell me is the Carlsberg version of computers, but I’ll be no wiser and I’ll probably end up coming home with a refurbished dishwasher.

It’s like buying a television. I can remember our first TV set. It was a small black and white machine with a rabbit’s ears aerial perched on top of it. It had an on and off button, and a couple of buttons to change channels, so it wasn’t difficult to operate.

Choice was limited to two channels and programmes started in the afternoon and ended around 11pm with the national anthem. Channel- hopping had yet to be invented, which was just as well because there was no such thing as a remote-control.

If you wanted to adjust the volume or change the channel, you had to leave the comfort of the armchair and do it manually. Imagine trying to do that today with all the stations available.

Thankfully, modern technology has saved us from that legwork, but it has created complications in other ways.

My television is described as a smart TV, but I didn’t know when I bought it that it was way smarter than me. I need three remote controls to work the thing.

It has many functions, most of which I don’t understand, including a recording function.

I seldom record anything though because, whenever I try, I either can’t find it on the system afterwards or I have recorded something completely unrelated to what I wanted in the first place.

But that’s my fault for not being more tech-savvy. For example, the clocks go forward on March 29 this year for the purpose of daylight saving, and that means the clock in my car will probably be an hour behind until it catches up in October when the time changes again.

I’m proficient enough with technology to do the basics on the internet. I can engage with social media but it’s not always straight-forward for me either. I can manage Facebook, and when I say I can manage it, I can upload a photograph and make a comment, which is about the limit of my expertise. And that’s OK, I’m happy with that.

Social media is great for keeping in touch with friends and family, especially those in faraway lands, but there is a dark side to this medium too and parents of young children have a difficult job trying to shield them from it.

RTÉ reported recently that AI chatbot Grok has brought something that was largely hidden into the mainstream. Deepfake technology that can undress anyone in any image has existed for years, but it was mostly confined to niche websites, apps, or private channels.

I had no idea this was going on, but apparently these nudification apps are AI tools that create synthetic sexualised images of individuals, as well as using AI to undress people using their publicly available photos.

While these images are not real, they are very convincing and the harm they cause is very real.

It’s at times like this that I’m very happy to remain in my ignorance when it comes technology.

I have no idea who came up with the idea of creating a ‘nudification’ function or what kind of a mind even works that way, but it really makes me appreciate the innocent times I grew up in.

We may not have had much as kids, but I’m glad we didn’t have social media either. At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur, we were better off without it.