Artificial Intelligence and Me

Here is my complaint of the day. Artificial intelligence is all around us, and I have come to the conclusion that it has been specifically designed to make us look stupid.

It hit me as I lay down for my afternoon nap, casually playing a few games of Classic Words, tuned to the Extremely Hard level, hoping to get sleepy. The AI that I am playing against has an unfair advantage.

If you are not familiar with the game, I can tell you that it is just a little Scrabble game you play on your phone with an opponent by the name of Droid. Droid can fling all the letters it gets through every possible combination in less than the blink of an eye and blurt out a word that uses all seven letters for a 50-point bonus way more easily than I can. I am lucky if that happens to me once or twice a week.

The analogy is this matter that has come up in the sporting world. Should a woman who used to be a man be permitted to compete athletically with a woman who has always been a woman? "Always" meaning, with considerably less musculature.

If this were to be handled with the utmost degree of fairness, perhaps your musculature, hand-eye coordination, fitness, and sporting treachery would all be measured. Then, if you came within 10 to 15 kilospasms of similarity, you could compete—man, woman, or beyond. Say, an old man with an equivalently souped-up young person. A fair contest.

Well, I am nowhere within the fair degree of kilospasm differential to ever compete fairly with the AI opponent cheerfully playing Classic Words with me. The only way for me to win is to dial the game difficulty back, and that hurts my pride.

My best just cannot compete with AI because my brain is littered with Why am I not sleeping? Why don't I just get up and get at those weeds? Should I throw my mascara out because it is more than three months old? Can I take a store-bought thing to that picnic on Saturday?—and millions more fluffy little tendrils of thought—while AI is just whizzing around trying every combination until—bingo!—it finds a word using all the letters and gongs me. Fifty points, plus the benefit of all the points in all the letters.

Not fair.

I don't want to play in your yard,

I don't like you anymore...

I don't want to play in your yard

If you can't be good to me.

Take that, AI.