Under the Wire

I have lost track of how many columns I’ve written about my dislike of computers. Well, here is one more. Everywhere I turn there is a story about A.I. No, not the kind of AI we livestock people are familiar with which involves a squeeze chute, long plastic glove and well, you know. Nope, this A.I. means Artificial Intelligence.

Personally, my definition of this is all the annoying people walking around talking about things they know nothing about, but hey, enough about politics. The other, more menacing form of A.I. is smart machines that can think and figure stuff out working like a plastic human brain. Pretty scary as I see it. I suspect this new development has found its way into computers. Here’s why I am writing another computer story. There are three computers in my office. One, an outdated 17 inch screen MacBook Pro that I have recorded about ten thousand radio programs on. It replaced an old “tower” computer relegated to the scrap heap beside my desk, the third is a very new, comparably much smaller and very expensive lap top that does everything the old ones did only about forty times faster.

Obviously, my office should be a hot bed of intelligence floating through the air like flies at a picnic, but no. Here’s my problem.

No A.I. here. My computers are and always have been dumb. That’s right, I have three of the dumbest machines Apple ever made. How do I know this? It’s easy. These stupid machines all have one thing in common. They all do exactly what I tell them to do, usually with disastrous results. What good is all their A.I. if, instead of using it, they do what a semi-literate computer user/cowboy tells it to do?

I spend an hour composing an email using my two finger typing skills on a very important topic, then accidentally hit “delete” instead of “send.” What would a smart computer do? Of course. It would say, wait a minute pard. You don’t really want to delete this, even though you should learn how to use spell check, do you? Instead, my idiot computer responds to the delete key I hit by mistake and no human being will ever see my message. There is an “undo” feature on the machine but it only works if you don’t panic and hit nine other keys first.

For some reason, even though we have spent enough money on computers to have a new car in the garage, I have a collection of dropouts from the Mac University where computers go to get smart. Their dumbness is contagious, too. Now my “smart phone” has begun doing the same sort of stupid things. It lets me hit keys that leave my flashlight on long enough to run the battery down keeping me from using Siri to place my calls. I say. “Hey Siri” and am greeted with a yawn or worse yet, nothing at all.

You can take all this AI stuff, go to the squeeze chute, put on one of those long plastic gloves and …!