I have a bone to pick. I know auto-complete is supposed to be a time saver but on balance I wonder if the efficiency gained is worth the frustration caused. For anyone who has taken the time to disable auto-complete you are the banner carriers. You are the brave few who have stood up and shouted “My Phone is NOT smarter than I am!”
It has gotten to the point where auto-complete has convinced us that it is smarter than we are.
It all began with spell-check lo these many years ago. I used to be a good speller. Maybe not 3rd grade spelling bee champion but I could hold my own. And then one day, I no longer had to. My office suite repaired the mistakes I made in haste and allowed me to increase my speed.
And then, over time I realized that I could no longer apply myself to thinking about spelling. Like many things I simply accepted it as a benefit of modernity. Spellcheck was an omen of things to come. It was inevitable that one day, spellcheck would evolve. Now it completes our thoughts before we do.
Especially if the device you use is operated by two thumbs you have probably become more and more reliant on this time saving, space age feature.
But I can’t help but wonder if the technology has a downside. It has already stolen my ability to spell. Now it is stealing my decisions about what I search for, what I write in a letter or correspondence and perhaps even how I think. If you abdicate your mastery of a language to a machine I can see a time in the not too distant future when all we will need to know is the first word of any sentence and a few random nouns and adjectives.
For my part, I resent this. I have trouble handing the keys over to AI. Therefor in the New Year, my resolution is to really try and avoid spellcheck by stopping to think about the correct spelling of a word. When I do a Google search, I enter all the terms of the search in complete sentences. When typing a document I don’t accept the corrections without thinking. Taking an extra second to actually formulate a cogent sentence reminds me that I am the boss of me and all those years of education really do have an ROI.
rubesdontech.com 