Ben called last evening and it was great to hear form him. He was stuck in traffic so he had the time to gab with us. I’m afraid I did too much talking. One of the topics was his frustration with his high school students relying on AI too much and not learning how to research for themselves. As you may imagine, I’m sure I gave him too much of my opinion on that.
Later in the evening, just before heading off to bed, I had to update one of my Google commands to shut of the lights. I was reminded of Ben mentioning he was stuck in “rush hour” traffic, which is a complete misnomer when there is no movement at all. Anyway, one of my last commands before bed used to be, “Everything Off”. Which used to shut off a list of lights, fans, etc. Whether they are on or off, it assures nothing stays on all night. Used to anyway. I had to change the command to, “Turn Everything Off”. The anachronism being: how long has it been since there was a turn switch to turn off a ceiling light? Now I have to preface “on” or “off” commands with the word “turn” whatever off or on. This rates up there with “wind” the window down, “hang up” the phone, etc.
And —— to complete the circle of thought, I suspect this unnecessary change in smart speaker command syntax is due to the integration of AI into what used to be a straightforward, simple command, “Lights Off”. #ArtificialIntelligence
MjL 12 Dec 2025, 5:36 a.m.
After reading all that, some background on smart speakers if you don’t program one. I have a few commands I custom designed by typing in the command and the result of that command on the phone app. To avoid speech-to-text issues, some commands are intentionally odd to make it less likely for the idiot box to get confused. For instance “Fan On” was often confused by the idiot box and it would ask what “FM” I wanted to hear. So I labeled the fan as “cooler” and would then say “Cooler On”. Hearing the key words, it would refer to my stated actions and perform them. Now that AI is involved, instead of executing straightforward commands, it tries to think for itself and starts asking me a bunch of questions like, “What is a cooler?” or replying that, “AC control is not available”. As an experiment I renamed the fan as “Pickle”. The idiot box, in its attempts to think for itself, completely derails because a pickle is not something that has an “on” or “off” state. It now takes longer to explain what I want the stupid thing to do than if I just walked over and did it myself. #ArtificialIntelligence
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