# Your brother-in-law, the prawns and AI: a Christmas survival guide for estrategIA readers

Author: Fernando Nieto Lobato
Original publication: 2025-12-17
Spanish original: https://estrategiabyaleph.substack.com/p/estrategia-116-manual-de-supervivencia
English URL: https://elcontemplador.github.io/estrategia-english/essays/116/
Status: Published translation

This is a translation of the original Spanish essay published on 17 December 2025. Its claims, examples and forecasts retain that historical context.

English publication: 2026-09-29

*Archive note: this article was published on 17 December 2025. Its references to “this year”, current models and the coming Christmas belong to that date. The imagined dialogue below is translated from the Spanish original.*

> Dear readers, as you know, we usually analyse AI through the lens of institutions and governance. But today, since the approaching Christmas is a “battle” fought on personal ground, we are taking the liberty of addressing you more informally and offering this article in a more humorous vein, while still bringing what we believe are valuable reflections. Because once the debate erupts around the dinner table, protocols go out of the window.

The scene is inevitable. It will happen somewhere between the plate of prawns and the tray of *turrón*, the traditional Christmas nougat. Perhaps on Christmas Eve, perhaps on New Year's Eve, or they may wait until the Epiphany lunch on 6 January. Someone, probably your brother-in-law — the one who was an expert on volcanoes a few years ago and on Eastern European geopolitics a few years later — will clear his throat, point a prawn's head at you and say:

*“Hey, you know about computers and read that ‘estrategia’ newsletter... Isn't all this artificial intelligence stuff a bubble? Because I read on Facebook that ChatGPT can't even add up any more, and they were saying it was going to put us all out of work.”*

At that moment, dear subscriber, every eye at the table will turn to you. You are the “designated expert”. Silicon Valley's oracle at the family gathering. And you have two options: pretend to choke on a *polvorón*, one of those crumbly Christmas biscuits, or bring out this manual.

At **estrategIA**, we have spent the whole year analysing how AI is transforming public affairs and politics. That is why we have prepared this Christmas Survival Guide. The aim is not just to help you win the argument — though that too — but to use the conversation after dinner to move beyond alarmist headlines and towards what really matters: governance and our society's future.

Here are the greatest hits of Christmas controversy and how to answer them with rigour, irony and political insight:

## ROUND 1: “This is a bubble. In two years nobody will be talking about it, just like the Metaverse.”

**The quick reply (to silence the table while you pour the drinks):** “The Metaverse was a party nobody went to. AI is the electricity already lighting up the party. Share prices may fall, but the technology is here to stay.”

**The underlying argument:** *We need to distinguish between the financial bubble and the technological reality.* Yes, there is plenty of hype and inflated stock-market valuations for companies promising miracles. But unlike cryptocurrencies or the Metaverse, AI has immediate, widespread practical uses. It is already being used to summarise court files, detect tax fraud, optimise the electricity grid and speed up medical diagnoses. AI is not a “fad”; it is infrastructure. **In the future, we will stop talking about “artificial intelligence”, just as we do not talk about “electrical intelligence” when we switch on a light. It will simply be in everything.**

## ROUND 2: “AI is going to take all our jobs — and yours first.”

**The quick reply:** “It is very likely to replace many jobs, yes. But think about it: the vast majority of retired people don't work and live happily. The problem isn't machines working for us; it is how we distribute the wealth they generate.”

**The underlying argument (the bold position):** This is where, as an **estrategIA** reader, you should give the conversation a political turn. Forget the sugar-coated line that “AI will only be your copilot”. Let us be honest: AI is going to replace tasks and, as time passes — quite quickly, though — entire jobs. And that **does not have to be bad news**. Historically, we have tied human dignity to paid employment. AI forces us to rethink that link. If we achieve a technology capable of producing abundance with less human effort, the goal should not be to “invent pointless jobs” to keep us busy. It should be to ensure that governments create the conditions for a decent life during that transition, and that people freed from the yoke of having to work — sadly, often doing things they dislike or did not train for — can unleash their creativity and potential by doing other things. The real debate is not technological — “can a robot do this?” — but **political and fiscal**: how do we design new mechanisms of social protection? Are we talking about Universal Basic Income? Taxes on automation? AI should free us from compulsory work — many people will voluntarily want to keep working, and a proportion of jobs will still be done by humans for many years — rather than impoverish us. That is the real challenge facing governments over the next ten years, and [examples such as Ireland show us that pilot programmes like its basic income scheme for artists, which it decided to extend this year, can have very positive consequences](https://vandal.elespanol.com/random/una-renta-basica-de-1625-euros-al-mes-llega-la-primera-solucion-contra-el-desempleo-causado-por-la-inteligencia-artificial/37621.html).

## ROUND 3: “ChatGPT talks a lot of nonsense. My son asked it something complicated and it made everything up.”

**The quick reply:** “Your son probably used the free version and talked to it as though it were Google. Rookie mistake. You need to know how to ask these systems for things: if you use an old model and give it vague instructions, it returns generalities. But if you use a ‘frontier model’ and know how to ask, it doesn't give you nonsense; it gives you something close to a doctoral thesis.”

**The underlying argument (the ‘fault’ lies with the driver, not the car):** Here we need to explain how this technology really works. First, **the tool matters**. The free chat app on your phone — usually a smaller, older model — is not the same as **today's frontier models, especially with their reasoning switched on**. The difference in reasoning ability is like comparing a primary-school pupil with a university professor.

Second, and more importantly: **context is king**. At *estrategIA*, we see it every day: most “hallucinations” or mediocre answers are the result of a poor *prompt* — the instruction — and can be improved by asking better questions, or even by asking artificial intelligence systems to help us frame our needs more clearly.

## ROUND 4: “It uses so much electricity and water. AI is going to wreck the planet.”

**The quick reply:** “It is true that it consumes resources, although much less than some people have claimed. But demonising a tool that can help us solve climate change by giving scientific progress a major boost is like blaming an ambulance for using petrol on its way to save an injured person.”

**The underlying argument:** Do not deny the data: training massive models consumes energy and water. It is a real physical challenge, although models' actual consumption during inference is considerably lower than people were saying until a few months ago, and their efficiency improves every day. [A Google analysis in August 2025 measured a typical Gemini text prompt as using just 0.26 ml of water — five drops — compared with earlier estimates of 10–50 ml, and less energy than nine seconds of television](https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/google-ai-energy-efficiency/). But weigh that in the balance. Today, the big technology companies are the world's largest investors in renewable energy and, take note, in **nuclear fusion**. The paradox is that we need AI to save the planet. AI is designing new battery materials that do not depend on mines in conflict zones, optimising electricity grids to prevent renewable energy from being wasted, and modelling fusion reactors. AI's energy cost is an investment — an expensive one, yes — in reducing the energy cost of everything else. It is the price of admission to a genuinely green future, rather than one that exists only on a placard.

## ROUND 5: “You can't believe anything any more. With deepfakes, democracy is doomed.”

**The quick reply:** “Hoaxes have always existed; now they just come in higher resolution. The danger isn't the machine; it is that we keep sharing anything that reaches us on WhatsApp without thinking.”

**The underlying argument:** We have addressed this topic many times in **estrategIA**. Yes, industrialised disinformation poses an enormous risk to elections — and we have covered it repeatedly in this newsletter; [pay particular attention to the ‘liar's dividend’](https://open.substack.com/pub/estrategiabyaleph/p/estrategia-111-cuando-ver-para-creer?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web). We will see fake videos of politicians saying outrageous things. But defensive technology — watermarks, content traceability — is advancing too. The crucial point, however, is educating citizens.

We are at a historical moment that demands a new kind of “media literacy”. Just as we learnt to look both ways before crossing the road, we now need to learn to navigate the internet wearing a cognitive “bulletproof vest”. The problem with deepfakes is not technical but psychological: they work because they confirm our biases, because we like believing that lie about the politician we dislike.

AI forces us to mature as a society. Saying “I saw it in a video” is no longer enough, because seeing is no longer believing. This pushes us to recover critical thinking: cross-checking sources, tracing information back to its origin, and distrusting anything that provokes an immediate emotional reaction. If we can educate citizens in this healthy scepticism, democracy will not merely survive; it will become stronger. A society that thinks and checks before sharing is much harder to manipulate, with or without AI.

## The final toast (your conclusion)

If, after all that explaining, they are still looking at you sceptically, do not insist. There is a limit to the educational battle, and the *polvorones* are bringing a diabetic coma ever closer.

Once you have dismantled these horsemen of the technological apocalypse and your family is looking at you with a mixture of astonishment and information overload, pour a little more cava and offer a conciliatory conclusion.

Tell them that artificial intelligence is neither magic nor Skynet. It is one of the most sophisticated mirrors humanity has built. It reflects our biases and fears, yes, but also our immense ability to solve problems.

The future is not written. AI will bring massive disruption, winners and losers. But if there is one thing we argue at **estrategIA**, it is that the eventual outcome does not depend on the algorithm, but on politics, ethics and the decisions we ourselves make.

And if they want to understand how those decisions will affect their pension, their vote or their business, tell them there is a very simple solution:

*“Subscribe to **estrategIA**. They explain it all throughout the year, so next Christmas, instead of arguing, we can raise a glass to how much we have all learnt.”*

[Fernando Nieto Lobato](https://es.linkedin.com/in/fernandonietolobato?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

*Director of Digital Innovation at Institución Educativa ALEPH and editor of estrategIA*

Infographic based on this week's article, made with Nano Banana Pro:

[![Christmas survival infographic: a sceptical brother-in-law challenges the family’s reluctant AI oracle over prawns, followed by five arguments and strategic replies. Full English text follows.](https://elcontemplador.github.io/estrategia-english/assets/images/d12c41b0-8436-4a77-bf45-69a573a10cf6_893x1600.png)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dWGf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd12c41b0-8436-4a77-bf45-69a573a10cf6_893x1600.png)

*English alternative to the Spanish infographic:*

**#116: Christmas survival manual — your brother-in-law, the prawns and AI.** How to raise the level of debate at Christmas dinner: from alarmist headlines to governance. The two characters are labelled “The sceptical brother-in-law” and “You, the reluctant oracle”. The columns are “The attack: what your brother-in-law says” and “The strategic defence: the political/technical reality”.

| Round | The attack | The strategic defence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 1: The new bubble? | “It's all hot air. In two years nobody will be talking about it, just like the Metaverse.” | The Metaverse was an empty party. AI is the new **electricity**: infrastructure that already works — diagnoses, fraud, electricity grid. It is useful, not fashionable. |
| 2: The end of work | “It will put us all out of work — and you first.” | The challenge is **political and fiscal**, rather than technological. A debate about distribution: Universal Basic Income? Taxes on robots? Liberation, not impoverishment. |
| 3: “My son says it doesn't work” | “I asked it something difficult and it made everything up. It talks a lot of nonsense.” | Driver error. A free chat is not the same as a current frontier model. The key is context and knowing how to ask — the prompt. |
| 4: The ecological apocalypse | “It uses enormous amounts of electricity and water. It will wreck the planet.” | It is an investment. We need it to **solve climate change**: designing fusion, new materials and optimising renewable-energy grids. |
| 5: The death of truth — deepfakes | “You can't believe anything any more. With fake videos, democracy is doomed.” | The danger is not the machine but our bias when we share. The solution: new **media literacy**. Critical thinking and verification. |

**The final toast — a conciliatory conclusion:** AI is neither magic nor Skynet: it is a sophisticated mirror of humanity. The future depends on politics and ethics, rather than the algorithm. “Want to understand how this will affect your pension or your vote? Subscribe to the pioneering newsletter on AI and politics: estrategIA.”