Still a few bugs in the system

Digital display technology check at Watchfire Signs, Danville, Illinois

     Sometime it takes a while for the media to catch up. I see the Independent suggesting "The AI bubble may be about to burst." 

     God, I hope so. Because right now the hype is tedious and endless. I'm still doing the dishes and the laundry. Let me know when the next Boston Dynamics unit is ready to do either; then I'll share the enthusiasm. But right their robots seem only fit to dance. 

    Okay, and vacuum. I was skeptical about those little round robot vacuums. But we have one; it's great.

     But not intelligent. It does find its way around a room. And back to its little charging port. Which is impressive. But it can't do our taxes. Yet.

     Until then, I'm just waiting. I'm always reluctant to declare The Next Hot Thing to be a dud, ever since, more than 40 years ago, I announced that cell phones were a fad. They weren't.      

     So I acknowledge that artificial intelligence is both important and here to stay. I see that, just as telephone operators and gas station attendants were replaced by chips, so customer service reps and, I suppose, journalists, will give way to algorithms. Someday you won't have to decide what's for lunch; your kitchen will do that for you.  

      But look at me, adding to the annoying, pie-in-the-sky AI hype. Big on ballyhoo, short on helpfulness. Every day I write this little essay on blogger, a useful, intuitive platform that Google offers for free, just 'cause, and every time a little prompt pops up offering to insert a dozen or two links into my copy. My choices are "Dismiss" and "Apply." Not wanting a bunch of random links in my copy, I dismiss it. Every time. If you want to learn more about a noun, you can search it yourself.
     So rather than making my job easier, it's making my job harder. Adding an extra step. Every time I write something.
     Finally I took dynamic action to get rid of it — or tried to. By asking AI, ironically enough. I dove into the settings and flipped a few things. Only I couldn't shut it off. Whatever AI suggested didn't work. It still offers to toss links into this. Maybe that's the true future of AI —a system that spares you from the annoyance it will cause if you don't stop it.

     I'm sure AI is going to get better. Any minute now. Though we may come to miss the days when it didn't work that well.