The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Sitting around last night with a few of our friends waiting for the phone and internet to come back into service after the Bomb Cyclone, we hit on the subject of Artificial Intelligence used to facilitate the drudgery of data entry in their genealogy research. Always a day late, a dollar short and probably a half century behind, I was amazed my friends all had AI. Turns out, surprise surprise, it comes with their smartphones and laptops. Just jumps right in to give a friendly assist, unsummoned, ready to serve.

Apparently you can turn the digital servant off. You know, if you want to navigate the universe without auto-pilot. My friends didn’t. Oh, it annoyed them occasionally, jumping in with unwanted suggestions, but they could ignore it and anyway, mostly it was useful. “I only use if for the boring stuff,” Linda said. “Saves me a lot of time.”

The world moves too fast for me down here in my hidey-hole at the end of the island. How is it possible most of us only just heard of AI a few years ago and now it’s embedded in our devices? It’s 50 years since Toffler’s book Future Shock came out, warning us about the accelerated speed of change in our societies. How long did it take from the first home computer to the year we all had at least one? Remember those first portable phones, the ones about the size of a shoe box with an antenna you pulled out for better reception? Now I’m the last person in America without one carried everywhere I go.

Linda claims she doesn’t plan to use the AI app much. I claim we’ll all be using it in no time flat all the damn time. Technology has a way of worming its way into our lives, becoming more and more indispensable. Today our internet is still down. The neighbors are complaining. They’re cut off from the outside world. They’re living like animals in the last century. The Dark Ages are back!

Course, I’m doing fine. Ignorance, they say, is bliss. Maybe so. All I’m sure of in these once future days, a world without AI is okay too….

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 30th, 2024 at 5:43 am and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.