Pnewsology

The week’s news with a dash of psychology!

Jane Ogden (Professor in Health Psychology, Emeritus; email janeogden509@gmail.com; based on a conversation with James Cannon at Radio Surrey; 8.40 am 28/11/25)

Week ending 28/11/25

This was ‘budget week’ and the news was full of changes to tax and welfare systems with the government declaring that this was a Labour budget with labour values and the opposition and pretty much all the newspapers using it as an opportunity to score political points.  As far as I could see no-one stood back and thought ‘Lets have a think and see what will be best for the country’!

Amidst all of this was one whopping human error when the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) accidentally pressed publish too early and released details of the budget together with their forecast even before Rachel Reeves could.  With all the expertise, technology and systems in place a human error became headline news.  We also heard of human error when a children’s football coach in Northern Ireland published a ‘drugs list’ on the coaches chat! Bizarre! Consisted of the prices of different drugs (illegal) and a phone number to get them! He was quickly dropped!

So, if humans are prone to error is AI here to save the day?

This week the police announced their new AI Bobbi to help as a virtual assistant leaving real Bobbys to deal with the more emergency and sensitive problems.  Wes Streeting as always remains a great fan of AI to save the NHS and improve the health of the nation.  And the OBR predicted that AI would make a huge contribution to growth over the next year.

But AI still makes mistakes.  Apparently, Elon Musk’s Grok will tell, if asked, that Elon Musk is better looking that Brad Pitt, would beat Himmler in a poop eating contest and be quicker to resurrect than Jesus!  Really??

And surely we still need humans?  The dreadful fires in Hong Kong have been devasting and I’m sure drones will one day be used to deliver water and help put these out.  But can drones reassure people, carry people out of burning buildings or encourage them to stay put if that’s for the best? We’ve heard of a local food charity called Fareshare clocking up over 32,000 volunteer hours this year to create food packages and cook hot meals for those in need.  And Surrey and Border NHS Trust have an extra £20 million to support people with Eating Disorders.  Surely these are jobs for humans who can chat, smile, listen and react.  Not sure a robot can ever be as good as some people at that! Well maybe some people I can think of but not many!

And maybe human error is fine and just something we have to live with.  Own up, say sorry, try not to do it again and we will all accept ‘that could have been me’, give respect for them for being honest and move on.

We seem to want to live in a zero-error world where everything runs perfectly.  BUT that’s simply not possible.  Humans and even AI get things wrong.  But do we want zero error?  In the law of unintended consequences, even if we try to sort out problems now, we could easily cause more problems in the future.  AI could streamline all our services, simplify our shopping and even do our jobs.  But then who would we chat and laugh with? A world without banter would be the biggest error of all.

All opinions are those of Jane Ogden