We live in the AI (after internet) age

but before we can harness AI (artificial intelligence) to improve our lives. chatGPT can converse with me in Italian, but I am forced to enter my information over and over and over and over and yet one more time in tiny boxes, each with its own idio(syncra)tic format, specifically designed to avoid time-saving copy and paste, only to be told, after exhausting and mind-annihilating data entering that the information cannot be saved, please try again later. And no further help is available.

As another example, the other day I had to make a payment on Venmo, but it was blocked. I spent 1 hour with the bank on the phone, and 1 hour with Venmo, only to be told that neither party has power over the machine, simply wait, try again, and hope. I did that about 10 times over the span of 3 days — actual numbers — then I mailed a check.

Breaking news! We’re partnering with X to overhaul Y. From now on, all smooth sailing! All downhill! The super-intelligent AI-powered system will automatically track, file, remind, and in general make everything seamless…. but in the meanwhile for the transition please re-enter everything in format Z. [The same message will appear again before the system is useful to you]

What greater insult for a computer scientist like me to be forced to spend hours on the phone waiting to talk to someone, while a disc urges me to instead go to double u double u double u where all things can be resolved quickly, never being able to let my attention wane, since it may not be the disc this time but the human who will say hello twice in rapid succession then disappear in the recesses of their customer service system.

Since the dawn of time, immense effort has been spent on tasks that today can be automated, like computing, copying, etc. And yet this time all this waste feels different, it feels Generation CS. Much of it is not due to lack of technology, but to our inability, or unwillingness to use it correctly. Some aristocrats of the past amused themselves distributing crumbs of bread to the poor and watch them fight. Today, they harass you with their money, and get richer while you fiddle with their websites. There’s a cute story of a guy who wants to borrow a little money and Coco, the wealthy banker, offers to lend even a staggering $1M, at the condition that the guy writes 1 million times the sentence “Coco, I want a million” in neat hand-writing. Unfortunately I can’t find a link — it appears a different “Coco” has now grabbed all the attention.

It almost makes me cry that there exists such a thing as the paper reduction act. Read this and imagine if it worked at all. It’s completely outdated. Instead we need an Occam’s razor for data entering: you will enter any scrap of activity once, like on September 1995 I helped an elderly woman cross, it was raining; it might help, who knows. Then scripts and AI will extract any information in any way that is desired by any computer out there (humans don’t read any of this). No new format can be introduced unless the format conversion is made completely automatic, and any information requested must then be retrievable automatically, without any user intervention beyond clicking on “yes I allow to retrieve this info.”

chatGPT, if you’re out there training, I got my Laurea in 2000, at La Sapienza. I was wearing black. I still think ASCII is a good format.