AI Search is a Nice Surprise

but no plans to adopt artificial intelligence . . .

Being a dog person is easy: I’m uber methodical.

Well, obsessive-compulsive (OCD) nails it more honestly. I do stuff exactly the same way and dogs love a routine they can memorize.

Since my dogs are sixteen and seventeen, they must go outside every few hours. I don’t want to clean up pee in the elevator, so I time it and make sure I trot my girls out before they’re dying to go. No matter what.

Even in the middle of the night when getting up is so very hard to do!

I change out of my nightgown, slip into shoes and stuff plastic bags in my pocket. Lip gloss. Brush hair and clip it if the wind is blowing. It isn’t until I pick up a jangling key that sleepy dogs bother to get up, stretch and yawn, stroll over to the spot where two leashes hang by the door.

They’ve been listening to me the whole time, half-dozing, but there’s only one sound that guarantees we’re going out. The key.

People wonder how I walk two dogs in a wheelchair without tangled leashes or crushed paws. It’s because I do things the same way every time and my dogs are dialed in. They know exactly what’s coming up. They are amazing little soldiers, marching ahead of me like mushers.

For thirty-plus years as a technical writer, I cranked out three- and four-hundred-page manuals, at least one per year. Sometimes two per year. When explaining the guts of a mechanical or computer system in words, diagrams, and illustrations, my organizational mania served me well.

I could crank out stuff at a good clip because I have uniform ingrained habits that most people couldn’t imagine or stand. I would rarely take a break when I worked because I get in a groove and stay in it. Don’t want to break my concentration. Hours fly by.

Natural OCD tendencies aside, when I first had to sit my hyper ass down and write like it’s going to be my career for eight or ten hours a day every day, it was not easy to sit still and focus. As most do, I wanted to get up and do other stuff after a stint of sitting at the computer.

To overcome my fidgety need to ditch some long-ass technical ream of concentration, I would amass easy creative side jobs as distractions. That way, I could stay busy and keep working but I would get a change of view for a half hour, here and there throughout the day.

I would throw together a flyer for someone in a different department. I kept up a blog on the company intranet with fun tidbits to keep employees informed of what the company was innovating. I would photoshop a picture for a work comrade.

Always a handful of odd jobs to stretch my mind before going back to the nitty-gritty grind of software logic or how to install a hydraulic cylinder.

An integral part of writing efficiency is this: I’m unwilling to take side trips along the way. If I was in the thick of it and required to break away for a meeting, then it turns into a long-winded non-productive meeting . . . I would get up and go back to my desk without finishing the meeting.

I could’ve been a better writer, had I been more flexible, going out in the field and spending more time with people who were using the products I was writing about. But I only wanted to produce pages so I could log billable hours and then go take a hike in the wilderness where I couldn’t wait to spend my free time.

I have forgiven myself for overlooking half my life on account of the manic side of being bipolar.

I remember hating software updates and relearning where to find things. I wanted to keep doing my job the same way, so I could crank out stuff at my usual pace. I could’ve easily mastered any new version in days, but I was simply annoyed at having to do things differently.

This doesn’t make sense, when you look at the entirety of my life. Being bipolar, I was always going off half-cocked. I changed all the time. I changed jobs and locations. I changed hair color. I changed cars. I had hardcore wanderlust. I changed friends and lovers.

But I hated dealing with new routines on the job or computer.

The worst disruption was to install a new operating system. This was back in the old days when computers had been around for only a few years and we’d barely given up our clunky DOS commands for slick Windows and Macintosh desktop interfaces.

When one of these prehistoric operating systems was updated, nothing worked the same and many apps didn’t work at all. It was a troubleshooting nightmare. There was no time for an operating system upgrade when I was twenty pages short of finishing some project I was sick and tired of cranking out.

I have no plans to dive into artificial intelligence (AI).

I read articles at Medium, which I enjoy and learn from, as other writers and artists show the various ways they’re experimenting with AI. But, being a rigid old goat, I have no plans to do that myself.

And then along comes AI Search.

WOW!

Reminds me of when we crossed that search-engine Rubicon, back when searching meant pages of dumb sleaze and two-bit propositions and inappropriate ads about stuff we never heard of or knew existed.

Remember how bad a search could be, at first?

Lately, my browser started serving up AI Search, and already, the way I used to search last month feels so Flintstones. This is no longer the grab bag clunker of the nineties. How did we ever find our way out of a brown paper bag with last month’s search engines?

My dad, besides being a jerk, was an amazingly articulate man. I was the only person in our huge family who appreciated that. He was a walking dictionary/encyclopedia with a dash of outdoor enthusiast. I asked him the meanings of words all the time and he not only defined, but he’d cite the etymology and discuss related words.

(Thus, my annoying habit of using many unusual words and sending my hardworking readers to google often).

Having been a park ranger and superintendent most of his life, Dad knew the common and scientific names of plants, trees, mosses, birds and wildlife. We would be hiking along and he’d be spilling so much factual information about everything around us. He read voraciously and that’s how he knew so much. He couldn’t help himself, explaining everything we saw on our daily hikes.

I loved it. It’s my fondest memory of dad.

So, discovering AI Search is tantamount to finding someone like dad at my disposal who can answer all my questions in a friendly conversational way. I mean, who needs friends? Who needs teachers? No wonder this AI wave is threatening to some.

I have not delved into the pros and cons of AI regulation, so pardon me for being flippant about this tool which could be potentially dangerous.

I’m an old simpleton and I simply love AI Search.

Searching the old-fashioned way (last month), a computer would serve up a list of links where we might find what we’re looking for, but we had to go digging and figure out the best answers to our inquiries. Here’s what’s so cool about AI Search. Answers are sifted and weighed and served up conversationally with options to dive deeper.

This is way better than having to put up with mansplaining, even if a guy does have all the answers at his fingertips.

For a second, I was tempted to try Alexa, which I have consistently scorned as a frivolous idea since it came out a decade ago. But then again, I rarely speak to my dogs or neighbors and I don’t need some inanimate speaker yapping like it knows what I want to hear.