This Is This

You know the guy. Microsoft Word, yeah?

“Hey, it looks like you are writing a letter. Let me help you…”

No.

One of the most annoying things about overly smart technology is that it assumes what you’re about to do and then pre-empts your actions in bid to be helpful. Sometimes this is useful. For example, if I turn on my DVD machine while I am watching TV, the input automatically switches to DVD mode instead of the channel receiver. Then if the movie is in widescreen, the screen layout changes automatically. All good.

But if I write “Dear” at the top of a page in a Word document, maybe I don’t want to write a letter. Maybe Mister Clippy should mind his own beeswax.

Maybe I wanted to write out some lyrics and I didn’t want them to come out all:

13 Sep. 06

Dear Prudence,

Won’t you come out to play? Greet the brand new day. Sun is out, the sky is blue. It’s beautiful.

And so are you,

Cliff

When I went away two weeks ago I drove a rented a car which was so intelligent, it actually had a fucking attitude.

Instead of having a key, it had a card, so all you had to do was walk up to it and the doors would silently unlock. When you got in, you just pressed a button and the car would start. You wouldn’t even have to get the card out, just having it in your pocket was enough as you approached the car, because it knew. It knew. The boffins at Fiat obviously thought that reaching for one’s keys was an inconvenience, so they eliminated that need for us.

But here’s the thing. I’m always worried about my rental cars being stolen. I never pay the excess insurance thing and I’m always convinced I’m more likely to be the victim of car theft overseas than I am at home, even though statistics normally suggest otherwise.

So I normally go back to the car to check that I’ve locked it, especially with cars that lock by remote control. Trouble is, when I returned to the car with the card key thing in my pocket, it silently unlocked the car. It is important to say that the locking and unlocking process made no noise, because the only way I could be sure if the car was locked was to walk up to the car and try the door. Of course, when I walked up to the car with the card on me, it unlocked it silently. I think. Unless I had never locked in the first place. In which case, how do you lock the car?

The only way the driver of this car could check whether the car is actually locked is either to leave the key behind on the pavement and return to the car to check the door, or stand back while asking someone else to try the door.

Rubbish.

There were lots of other things, too. You couldn’t park the car in gear, because the engine wouldn’t turn off it you had your foot on the clutch, as it assumed you wanted to keep driving. So you couldn’t park safely on a hill.

Sometimes I think that the smarter technology gets, the dumber we are made to feel. We end up being angry and stupid because the machine won’t let us do the thing we’ve always done. Machines should learn from us, not the other way around.

This is like as good a time as any to promote a website that deserves your attention before it’s too late.

Humans United Against Robots 
The blurb says: HUAR was designed to educate and aware the citizenry of the world the impending attack that computers and robots will put into affect against humans.

HUAR is the creation of Keith and the Girl, the best podcast on the Internet.

Keep it stupid.

—
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 6:40 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.