THE HUMAN BRAIN…

Model T of the 21st Century….

At the risk of sounding like my mother hollering out the back door that I’ll break my neck, I’m going to sputter about a downside to our current Never-Never-Land of technology toys. We seem to be obsessed with finding ways to avoid thinking and doing, those antiquated and unnecessarily strenuous approaches to enjoying existence. Ergo:

The first time I encountered an advertisement for Grammarly, I was reminded of two things from my past. The first was the “blue book library” maintained by the fraternity house back in my college days. Since academic prowess afforded brownie points to members of the Greek community, it was considered important to assist everyone’s performance in that area. Ergo, the “blue book library” was a collection of old exams and term papers from the previous decades which one could consult or plagiarize when necessary or simply desired.

Secondly, the idea of a computer program that corrects my spelling errors and other linguistic misfires seems to present a rather stupid alternative to learning the material myself. It is said that we learn from our mistakes, so what do we learn when we are rescued from the bother of making any? To add a little sugar to that already presweetened intellectual pastry, the program will even suggest “better” ways to express an idea! As a former editor of sorts, any robotically created or enhanced piece landing on my, desk would have immediately ricocheted to the nearest waste basket.

I love writing and I particularly value writing well, if not briefly. Words are some of the human being’s most fundamental tools, and skillful use of any tool is an asset. But for some, including me, words are also toys that are perpetually new, enjoyable, and educational. I think my greatest violation of that pursuit is that I sometimes tend to create week-long sentences that are a blast to put together but communicate absolutely nothing of value.

Sadly, the arrival of such a computer application on the scene doesn’t surprise me. It fits right in with the dominant philosophy of the times, which is that appearances, are far more important than reality. The twenty first century is a western movie set from another age where everything one sees is little more than plywood and cheap paint. Once the desired impression has been made or the idea at least planted, the veneer is abandoned to the fate of the winds. Whether or not the seed takes root is apparently of little concern, the only value lying in the shallow drama of demonstrating an “effort”, whether real or parodied.

I fail to see the purpose in such a waste of time, unless it would be the ready availability of a computer generated voice responding “I tried” to any suggestion of failure. The computer is being established as the ultimate authority over human thought and action. That’s sad. Perhaps I was on the right track twenty five years ago when I took my first “computer” down to a local gravel pit, along with my .357 magnum revolver and executed a rather poignant editorial, if I do say so myself.

I don’t see how an AI activity designed to replace the need to think for oneself, or to even perform one’s own ADLs, could possibly be considered a thing of value. The fad these days is to have a little electronic chamber slave in every room to prepare coffee, turn lights on or off, play music, answer simple questions, and more. Why not have one stuck in one’s back pocket to do menial classroom work for its master? Back in the day, that was called a “crib sheet.”

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Electronic Baby-sitters…

…Do not make Effective Writers….

In spite of much exaltation of the digital world of communication, or, admittedly, perhaps because of it, I rarely find myself reading through some missal without cringing. I’ve done a variety of things during my lifetime, but I think deep down I’ve always been a bit of an editor. Spell-check be damned, and it usually is, it seems the written word of today is first seen and allegedly “corrected” by algorithms. Now the purveyors of canned English are even advertising a program, or whatever they call it, to supposedly tune up the writer’s poor grammar and wording. Undoubtedly, the next brilliant idea will be a program to tell people what to think and how to think it. Actually, if one takes the time to count the beans and look at the pretty colors, perhaps that is already a work in progress.

Never.

I write because I have enjoyed that effort for as much as sixty years, give or take a few months. Over the course of those years I have learned to love words, language, and how they can be woven together to facilitate communication, to describe and pass on the very heart of human culture, to bring about change, to create great literature, and more. The very idea of some machine spitting out rules of usage according to a pre-approved menu of permissible options created by some obscure committee or individual disturbs me. I don’t dislike machines. They can be useful tools, but they should work for humanity, not the other way around, and they should not be secretly created to build a world according to the latter.

The internet has provided the opportunity for countless individuals to express their ideas and exchange them with others. There are downsides to the anonymity inherent in the platform, but individuals themselves will iron out the conflicts eventually if not interfered with.

When I read through an article, I can’t help but read it to some extent with an “editor’s eye,” and I often find myself asking out loud “Did anybody bother to actually read through this thing before pushing the enter button? Holy crap!” Even a stupid idea can be well written, but all too often “internet journalism” is a minefield of poor wording, poor grammar, and poor spelling. I am surprised that so many actually endorse such products with their bylines. I’d bet a Walmart toaster gets a better inspection at the end of the production line than virtually any internet writing today.

I think people would benefit by having to discover and correct their own mistakes. We all make them, and nobody learns anything by passing the buck, or in this case the dictionary, the thesaurus, or the Style Manual. An aspiring writer who learns to expect electronic baby sitting will be taught to settle for a “CEE” by parroting the ideas of others.

We all do that to an extent because that is the nature of “language”. We use words and structures that tend to be generally understood within our communities, but there is a galactic environment of different ways by which to construct meanings and draw mind pictures and these should not be dictated.

I usually change what I write for a blog or some similar venue two or three times before “publishing” it, yet I still find mistakes after the fact. I use Microsoft Word as a writing program, and it almost always flags something, and I almost always disagree and override it.

The positive side of the story is that we still have the ability to choose whether or not to defer decisions about our writing to electronic devices and programs. Even if we are subjected to the unsolicited dictates of some built in application, we still have the power to override them and stick with our own original format, but that interruption can become annoying.

Nevertheless, I would hope that more of the general population of kitchen table journalists and hobby bloggers come to appreciate the benefits of doing their own pre-editing.

 

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