I’m enjoying Apple’s new operating systems.

It’s been a little over a week since I upgraded all of my devices to the latest operating systems.

Thus far, it’s been pretty good. I’ve noticed a few little glitches but nothing annoying enough to make me want to downgrade.

I’m assuming that some of the visual errors and some of the other unpredictable behaviors in my phone, my iPad and my computer will be addressed by some point release of the software in upcoming months.

I have to give Apple credit. They did a good job on all of these operating systems.

I am curious to see how Siri is improved by AI. Lately, I’ve been playing around with the Dictation system and honestly it’s better than I thought it would be.

I don’t know that it’s good enough for me to be able to write an entire story, more properly, dictate an entire story, but it is surprisingly good.

I can remember using some early dictation software and boy it wasn’t even hit and miss, it was miss & miss.

I’m still unconvinced that the artificial intelligence is going to be helpful. I worry that it might make things so that people don’t have to really think about what they’re doing.

I’m not sure that the AI is going to be that kind of smart and I doubt it will be a replacement for humans but I can see a bunch of people thinking that they just aren’t going to have to do any kind of work or thinking for themselves, they’ll let the machines do it. I’ve seen it in the past with people interacting with computer systems.

The most irritating phrase I’ve ever heard is, “The computer says…

I’ve been known to annoy mindless people who told me “the computer said,” with asking them what they think. I’ve also asked, who controls who? Are you the tool of the computer or is the computer your tool?

In the past, some people would get it.

Terminator t 800 endoskeleton 3d model max obj 3ds fbx mtl.These days, all I get is a blank mindless look which, in itself, answers the question.

I can tell you this, I am not ready to have a full-blown two way conversation with an AI. I don’t think I could contain myself. I wonder how AIs will respond to obscene language?

I wonder if we’ll be able to insult an AI by calling it HAL?

The spookiest part about all of this is AI’s computational abilities might produce a better customer service experience.

If the AI has the ability to answer your question by looking at all of the relevant data in say, your past five years of electric bills, it could produce a better experience and would eliminate the need for humans in customer service roles.

I gotta admit there’s another flight of fancy that goes through my head. What would happen if I was able to ask my personal assistant, say Siri, to get in contact with the AI from the water company to sort out a billing question or error. That would be really weird, my computer/device talking to their computer/device and solving a problem that was vexing me the poor dumb human.

It really could turn into a situation where the machines, our creations (our children if you will), become our caretakers and it’s entirely possible that it will speed humanity straight on towards extinction.

When I think about stuff like that, My only thoughts are,

“Well, we had a good run. 

Maybe the AIs will do better than we did.”

We might come full circle…

Western Electric Rotary TelephoneI was having a text conversation with my Sister and our Aunt, this morning. In the course of the conversation, I realized my Sister was using dictation to compose her text messages.

Shortly after the conversation, I thought to myself, if she was dictating her text messages, then why didn’t she just call me? I mean, if you’re speaking out loud, why not actually have a telephone conversation?

I realize that she was including my aunt and myself in the text message.That being said, she could just simply have conference called us. We all have FaceTime, she could have turned it into a video chat.

I keep thinking to myself we’re gonna come full circle anytime now. People are gonna realize that actual voice communication between two individuals might be a lot more productive than going through the sterility of a text message.

Once that happens then we’ll figure out that the nuance of the human voice is far more precise than just getting a text message and wondering whether or not the person was angry or sad or depressed or happy or just simply distracted. All of those things we can instinctively determine by hearing a person’s voice.

It’ll probably take another 20 years and I won’t be around to see it. But wherever I am, whatever I am, I’m probably gonna be laughing my ass off, when the kids discover this new thing called a telephone conversation.

Exploding Pagers & Radios? Oh My!

Pager explosion 768x439.When I first saw some of the snippets of news talking about exploding pagers, I thought it was yet another hoax from Hezbollah or Hamas, or any of a number of the other savage organizations operating in the Middle East. I thought they were trying yet again to blame Israel for their own screw up.

You know, kind of like when the morons in Gaza blew up their own hospital with malfunctioning rockets aimed at Israel. 

When it was apparent that the story was real, I thought it was brilliant. If members of these terrorist organizations weren’t outright killed, at least they were too maimed to be interested in hurting other people. 

Then I thought, “Hmm, If their pagers were in their front pockets, even if they survived, they weren’t going to be able to reproduce or rape anyone anymore,” and I counted that as a definite win.

Whoever thought of this in the IDF deserves a freaking medal! When we had troops in Afghanistan, I was always a big believer that we should’ve randomly made every cellphone in the country ring just to blow up the IEDs. People always asked, “What about the collateral damage to innocents?” My answer was always how innocent is someone with IEDs being built in the basement?

I know I sound harsh. But these people have, after decades of bullshit, devalued themselves with me to the point of being nothing more than crudely drawn characters in a video game. I no longer see them as human. They’re liars, untrustworthy, despicable, things. They’re crash test dummies now. It’s not hate, it’s complete unconcern and distain. They’ve become the characters in the video game that you shoot in the head to see how many different patterns of blood spatter the game developers programmed into the game.

I hate that we’re still sending money to the Middle East. I’m for letting them wallow in the cesspool of their own making and think they should either prove to the rest of the world that they’re worth something or be allowed to devolve into nothing.

I do find it ironic that a people who want to drag the entire world back to the 5th century are being hurt by 20th and 21st century technology. Perhaps if they walked their own talk, Allah wouldn’t have allowed them to be punished with exploding technology. 

Maybe that’s the lesson we should be teaching them. Stone Age people have no business messing with Western magical juju.

They should stop using cars, planes, busses, phones, computers, electricity, medicine, & indoor plumbing. Perhaps they should return to their old ways as bands of tribesmen tending their flocks. We could facilitate that by making various modern devices explode randomly. Aversion therapy I think it’s called. Make it so they can’t trust any technology so they stay away from it altogether.

It would solve a bunch of problems for them, and the rest of the world.

To fight crime, I honestly wonder if building every single item with a bomb in it would be a great idea.

If the item is stolen, it detonates when it’s reported as stolen. That would shut down the crime in this county and it would only take a few years.

I think it was RoboCop that introduced the idea that car thieves got fried inside the car they were trying to steal. That’s always been an image I liked when it came to thieving of any kind.

If technology were to be expanded to include GPS Coordinates so that the devices themselves knew where they were and then exploded if they were delivered to specific areas of the world, I’ll bet you could eliminate rockets and mortars being stored in schools, hospitals, mosques, and UN facilities in Gaza or Lebanon. 

I’ll admit, low yield explosives blowing Hezbollah’s balls off just tickles the hell out of me.