Hostile Takeover!

I find myself, almost daily, having an argument with one or more of my electronic devices. There are these features on my phone and my iPad that are there to help me take shortcuts, which I rarely use. My kids have suggested that I turn them off, but on the few occasions that I do use them, they are nice. What isn’t so nice is when my devices think they know what I’m going to say, or want to say, but they don’t, yet they insist on making the same correction over and over again, until I find myself pounding on that little “x” to erase, while virtually shouting at my iPad or cellphone, “That’s not what I want to say! Stop it!”

For the longest time, when signing my emails, my iPad would decide that my name was “Usher”. I learned to type in the 70’s on a typewriter. It was electric, in case any of you were thinking that I am from the stone age. I didn’t learn to “keyboard”, as it’s called now, but the typewriter and the keyboard are laid out exactly the same. The “S” you type with your left hand, the “U” with your right, so it’s not like my hands just slipped to the wrong key. My iPad never decides on a different name for me. Just “Usher”. I am not a musically talented, black man, but my iPad seems to think it’s a good name, and I should try it out. It also decides to randomly capitalize letters. Perhaps it believes certain words are under appreciated. A capital letter in the middle of a sentence may make the reader more attentive, or cause them to re-read the sentence to see if they missed something. Sometimes it changes words altogether, but I’ve learned to proofread emails because of this hostile takeover by my iPad. I’ve been made a fool of more than once and have learned my lesson. Sometimes even I can’t figure out where I was going with the sentence that Mr. iPad so carefully crafted!

Then there is the cell phone. We’ve all had these texts where we hit send, just as you notice that the word you meant and the word your phone thought you wanted were not even close! It took three tries for “w” to morph to “wineed”, finally making it to “winner”, and every time I text “for”, my phone is positive I mean “fir”, complete with a pine tree emoji! In the meantime the person you were texting is wondering if you’ve been drinking! One time I texted, “Did you die….”, instead of “Did you buy”. At least that got an immediate response.

The reason I bring all this up is because we’ve all been victims of our electronics, thinking they are far wiser than we are.  The same people who write all the programs for these cute, handy, short-cutting things on your devices to make your life easier, but actually don’t, are also the same people who are writing the programs for self-driving cars, and are talking about pilotless airplanes. Now, ask yourself, is that a good idea?