INTELLIGENCE, ARTIFICIAL OR OTHERWISE
This morning I took Maggie, my son’s dog, who spent the night with me, up Jones Mountain. She is much more eager to climb Jones mountain than I am, but it does me much more good to get the exercise than it does her. And I know exactly how much exercise I get because as soon as I begin to walk, without asking me, my Apple Watch begins to record the walk recording how far I’ve walked, how long I’ve been walking, how fast I have walked in miles per hour and how high I have climbed. And about half way through the walk it will ask me if I want to record my walk as an outdoor walk which it will do free of charge.
All of this is done completely independently of my being conscious of it. And then it occurred to me that my body is doing something very similar. My body, without my being aware of it is straining waste out of my bloodstream, digesting my morning’s breakfast, monitoring my blood glucose, maintaining the functioning of my kidneys and liver and pulling oxygen from the air and pumping it around my body.
I don’t think of my body as having intelligence, any more than I think of plants as having intelligence as they pull water and nutrients from the earth and maintain themselves as they grow and flower.
The artificial intelligence of my Apple Watch seems very similar to the intelligence of my body. Both seem miraculous.
So I shouldn’t get as crotchety as I have been when trying to function on-line, either to disconnect myself from the $120 Panera cup of coffee or to make heads or tails out of the Indian embassy online visa application.
In either case it is human error, my own mistakes (or Panera’s or the Indian Embassy)—garbage in, garbage out—that is causing the trouble. It is conscious humans dealing with conscious humans that is the problem.
So I have to relax and be patient with my computer and be forgiving of other humans and figure things out.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 