What in the Sam Hill is a “ChatGPT”?
So I’m reading the news, trying to figure out if my 401k is going to survive another quarter, and what do I see? Apple, bless their fancy-pants hearts, is apparently building a ‘ChatGPT-like’ app. Now, I don’t know what a ‘ChatGPT’ is, exactly, but it sounds like something designed by a committee of teenagers who think ‘innovation’ means adding more blinking lights to a toaster.
Back in my day, we had punch cards. You wanted something done, you typed it on a machine that sounded like a small engine factory, and then you waited. No instant gratification, no ‘Siri, tell me a joke’ nonsense. We had to think. We had to learn. Now, it’s all about these ‘AI’ gizmos that supposedly do the thinking for you. What’s next, a machine that chews your food? Oh, wait, they probably already have an app for that, too.
The Siren Song of Siri’s ‘Upgrade’
They’re calling it an ‘upgrade’ to Siri. Siri! That digital assistant who can barely understand my request to ‘call my wife’ without wanting to dial some random pizza place in Poughkeepsie. Now they’re giving her a ‘brain’? It’s like giving a badger a calculator and expecting it to do your taxes. It’s just going to dig holes and probably bite someone.
They say this new app is internal, just for them to ‘try out new features’. What features? Is it going to start giving unsolicited life advice? Telling me I should really consider a different brand of coffee? Knowing these Silicon Valley types, it’ll probably recommend a new cryptocurrency I’ve never heard of, then demand I invest my life savings into it. It’s all a big slippery slope, I tell ya. One minute it’s organizing your calendar, the next it’s convinced you to sell your house and buy a yurt in Oregon.
The Good Old Days (Before Everything Was ‘Smart’)
I remember when ‘smart’ meant you actually had a working knowledge of something, not that your toaster could order groceries. We had mainframes that filled entire rooms, and they did exactly what you told them to, provided you formatted your code with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. None of this ‘natural language processing’ mumbo jumbo where the machine tries to guess what you meant. If you made a mistake, you knew it. And you learned. You didn’t just ask the computer to ‘fix itself’.
These kids, with their ‘smartphones’ and their ‘apps’… they don’t know the satisfaction of a perfectly executed line of COBOL. They’ve never experienced the joy of debugging a program by staring at a printout for hours. It builds character, I tell you! This new ‘ChatGPT-like’ thing? It’s just another step towards making everyone’s brains as mushy as a week-old banana. We’re going to forget how to tie our shoes because there’ll be an app for that too. Mark my words, the future is going to be full of very confused, very helpless people, all staring blankly at their ‘smart’ devices, waiting for them to tell them what to do next. And I, for one, will be sitting on my porch, yelling at clouds, and fondly remembering the days when computers were dumb, and people were smart.