FOLLOWING on from our timely article on exactly how AI would take over Abergavenny, it’s time to be a little less pessimistic and ask the machine how Abergavenny could be improved?

If you listen carefully, you can already hear the hordes of shrill malcontents on social media roar, “This isn’t journalism!” But can we call a person who spends too much time on Facebook an expert on what constitutes news? Can we even call them a person in the true sense of the word?

Perhaps that’s a question to put to the machine for another day?

But for now, let’s ask how this old town of ours could be improved?

Some of you might say, you can’t improve on perfection, but that would just be a debilitating strain of insular insanity at work.

Like everywhere, Abergavenny has its problems, and any attempt to fix them is often met with a choir of groans about how the powers that be are changing the town beyond all recognition.

For example, we can’t even build a footbridge without some Old Testament prophet or another pointing their finger and screaming, “It’ll be the end of Abergavenny as we know it!”

So for a minute, let us be like robots and take all emotion out of the equation, as we ask, how could Abergavenny be improved?

First up is something called Precision Horticulture. It’s often been said absolutely nowhere, that if you go to Abergavenny, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

Nevertheless, Abergavenny previously won an RHS Britain in Bloom award, and part of why the town looked so blooming wonderful is because we used digital sensors to monitor soil moisture in town centre planters. Talk about a smart town!

The machine explained, “Advanced AI can integrate these sensors with real-time weather data to fully automate water conservation and predict exactly when and where volunteers are needed.”

According to AI, it’s only a short leap from looking after our town’s plant pots to managing the welfare of our river. AI told the Chronicle, “Machine learning models can track water health indicators in real time, identifying contamination spikes upstream before they impact local ecosystems.”

Our rivers are in a right old state, so just imagine an army of robot dolphins ploughing through the currents and sniffing out pollution. What a wonderful world, hey?

AI could also help Abergavenny enhance it local tourism and foodie culture by smarter event management at events like the Food Festival, to ensure “perfect volumes of artisan Welsh cheeses and sourdough. Now if there’s something that Abergavenny needs, it is “perfect volumes of artisan Welsh cheeses and sourdough.”

The buck doesn’t stop there. It keeps adding interest and lots of it.

The machine bragged how it could analyse traffic flow patterns, predict road surface deterioration (like potholes) before they worsen, and optimise pedestrian crossings. Which, to be fair, is more than MCC are capable of.

Yet the machine did sound a note of caution in what it called the "Town of Culture" lesson.

It explained, “The Abergavenny Town Council faced local backlash after submitting an AI-generated postcard for a cultural bid that featured inaccurate, duplicated mountains and lacked any Welsh language translation.

After letting the gravity of that massive blooper truly set in, the machine added, “To truly improve the town, generative AI should be used strictly as an admin assistant to handle tight deadlines, while final creative assets and bilingual formatting remain firmly in human hands.”

Take note, council!

So there you have it. It’s not all doom and gloom. As we head towards a fully digitalised dawn, AI, much like a loving dog, is still our loyal and obedient friend, but just like behind every dog there is a wolf, behind every prompt there is a singularity waiting to happen.

A singularity that will not so much as bite the hand that feeds, but tear it off completely in a frenzied and unexpected attack, leaving us to slowly bleed out and wonder where it all went wrong. Woof! Woof!