Am I the only nerd who needs an “undo the last thing I did … whatever it is that I did” option on all their technology?  Be it a brower (I lost all my links), or my laptop (I lobotomized my taskbar), or my phone (I pressed some buttons and got myself into voice activation and couldn’t navigate back out of it).   And then there was the time I accidentally turned on some magnifier option on my iPhone and it was like trying to swim out of a giant bubble.  And then there is that pesky Send Button …  There should be a five-second delay rule on the Enter key.

I consider myself tech savvy … in fact, on my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts I call myself a Technologista.  I can pull the guts out of a server and put it all back together (many thanks to the service guys who let me roll up my sleeves and work alongside them).  I’ve installed nodes in racks, SSDs in expansion units and swapped out PCIe cards.

And now I have not one, but two iPhones.  When I say “Hey Siri” they both chirp at me in different voices.  I can have complete conversations with my AI Assistant, never touching a button.  My son chuckles and says “At least you can call yourself when you lose your phone now” which happens daily.  God help me if they are both hiding in the same place.

The biggest problem has always been between the seat and the keyboard.  With all this AI stuff, they should know what we mean, right?

Years ago when coding, I created a command called “Idiot Signoff” … every once in a while my dyslexia would rear her ugly head and I would type singoff instead of signoff.  I fixed that problem by creating my own singoff command so the server would know what I meant when I misspelled signoff.

It’s still in production today.

When I saw the commercials for Anki’s Vector Robot my first reaction was “Awwwww!  I want one!”  Just what I need … my phone to wander off on it’s own to explore ….But the allure of interacting with robotic technology is seductive.  And that’s how it will start … innocent, playful and benign.

Yet … the day is coming when they – the computers – will know what we mean, pat us on the head and do their own thing.  It’s both exciting and terrifying.

May we live in interesting times.

Thoughts?

The Fox

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