The first rule of social media for IT professionals is “Never ever mention politics.” And I wouldn’t, except for the interesting parallels between the two. So, I mention politics only in reference to your laptop and promise not to editorialize on the body politic.

The first thing you notice when booting the computer of politics is that it is running terribly slow. This can be caused by a number things but most often by malignant malware, spyware, and otherware that can make your PC slow as mud running uphill. Dare I mention that these symptoms on a PC are cause for concern. The slowdown could be caused by any number of things, but many times they are malicious. See any parallels yet? If your PC was running as slow as the political mechanism, we would start from scratch and reformat, erasing any shadow of malicious software. A re-boot would surely be required. Or perhaps an upgrade to a new SSD.

Moore’s Law states that we can expect the speed and capability of our computers to increase every couple of years, and we will pay less for them. We experience this every time we have to update our PC because it just won’t handle the latest software. Off we run to BestBuy. Our analog hasn’t been updated in a couple centuries.

Technology is agile, it’s young and fresh and we vote for the latest and greatest. You can draw your own conclusions but based on comparison, it seems the political PC still uses 5.25 floppies, has a 10 Mb hard drive and is skating by with 8 Mb of memory. But don’t worry you can still run Windows 2000. The political PC has a very fuzzy screen. With 400 lines of resolution it’s really hard to make out details.

The old PPC (political PC) is noisy. The fan sounds like the bearings are running dry, the internal speaker is blaring the startup jingle. You wish for a quieter environment.

My laptop is predictable, it’s dependable, it’s current and up-to-date. I constantly examine it for malicious software. I wish I could say the same about…..well, you know.

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.