I’m a creature of habit. Although I’m no internet junkie (I still read books made of paper), I’ve come to rely on it for how I start my day. I get up early and do my writing and reading before work. I generally check my email first thing, and that’s where something went wrong. No internet. We’ve been going through one of those popular heat waves, and a band of thunderstorms (tried to check on their progress so I could see if it’s okay to open the windows, but wait—I need the internet to do that) had rolled through three hours ago, at about midnight. Maybe they’d knocked out power? The phone was out too so I had to call our provider on my cell. The robovoice cheerily told me there was a service outage and that for updates I could check their website. Hmmm.
I can read and write without the internet. I’m on Facebook for, literally, less than two minutes a day. I stop long enough to post my blog entry and check my notices. I hit what used to be Twitter a few times a day, but since people tend to communicate (if they do) via email, that’s how the day begins. This morning I had no internet and I wondered how tech giants would live without it. I’m no fan of AI. I use technology and I believe it has many good points, but mistaking it for human—or thinking that human brains are biological computers—flies in the face of all the evidence. Our brains evolved to help our biological bodies survive. And more. The older I get the more I’m certain that there’s a soul tucked in there somewhere too. Call it a mind, a psyche, a spirit, a personality, or consciousness itself, it’s there. And it’s not a computer.
Our brains rely on emotion as well as rationality. How we feel affects our reality. Our perspective can change a bad situation into a good one. So I’m sitting here in my study, sweating since, well, heat wave. It was storming just a few hours ago and I can’t check the radar to see if the system has cleared out or not. What to do? Open the windows. I’ll feel better at any rate. And in case the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, “open the windows” is a metaphor as well as a literal act on my part. And I don’t think AI gets metaphors. At least not without being told directly. And they call it “intelligence.”
