AutoCorrect Is Not Who We Are

Whether it is voice recognition, dictation, or Siri, predictive text is not given to the poetic in us. Rather, artificial intelligence assigns labels, predicts patterns. But humans always break the mold, no matter how predictable we appear to be.

We fight for words, stretching sentence structure for all it’s worth. Fragments rearrange and clauses connect until a sentence lays down tracks. It may have more than one subject but there is only one last word.

Such verbal banquets, sentences are. Who knows how many any paragraph will require. AutoCorrect weeds through consonants and vowels for words. Once found, there is the grammar, whose rules still stump artificial intelligence.

We are given to the chaos of life. Lasting peace is a contradiction. We don’t really want to be saved (even when we think we do). Perhaps, we want Siri to lay down a few sentences, at most a paragraph, but no one else is predicting our life. No one or no thing.

In a perfectly prescribed world, the written word would flow simultaneously with thought. Anyone who has ever written a single sentence knows the distance between mind and screen is often infinite, sometimes mere light years.

Predictive text may be trying to shorten that span but it is predicated on what has been and not what is. Without our voice, artificial intelligence is silent. Ours is the effort of experience, what AutoCorrect cannot capture.

Aim for Even posts offer equanimity a dose at a time. No day or dose is ever the same, even if the aim is. You may read about the origins of Aim for Even here or on this site’s About page.