While AI is scraping the internet and stealing everything it can find to give us sometimes very suck-up answers to ChatGPT or Gemini queries, I keep wondering about all the knowledge, skills and expertise still sitting in people’s heads.
Particularly people of retirement age.
There were nearly 658,000 retired people in Ireland in Census 2022**, up 21% in six years. People don’t suddenly lose decades of knowledge because they’ve retired.
If you want a shelf put up, something repaired, a garden sorted or a few jobs done around the house, there’s probably somebody nearby with the expertise, the toolkit and the drill to do it.
And it goes far beyond DIY. I told my mother recently I’d paid €40 to get two pairs of pants taken up and she freaked out. She has a sewing machine. “You should have come to me. Why did you do that?”
There are people everywhere who can alter clothes, repair furniture, paint, garden, fix bicycles or do hundreds of other things, often with decades of experience.
So why isn’t there an easy way of finding them?
A website, WhatsApp number or simple service could connect people who need small jobs done with retired or semi-retired people who know how to do them. Send a photo or a voice note and find somebody nearby.
There is already an Irish service called **Silver Skills** pursuing something similar, although its website still appears to be at an early recruitment stage.
The bigger idea for me is the knowledge itself.
AI can scrape what we’ve put on the internet.
It can’t scrape what’s still in people’s heads.
There are hundreds of thousands of retired people carrying decades of knowledge around with them. There has to be a better way of putting some of that knowledge back to work.
People retire. Their knowledge doesn’t.