I went for a walk and decided to use my technology to help me brainstorm ideas.
I opened up the notes app. I stuck my wireless headphones in my ears. I hit the transcribe button on the little virtual keyboard. And I started walking through the nature-adjacent path.
A lot of great ideas wound up in the little digital notepad.
And then also… a lot of weird broken ideas pulled from the blur of whatever happens when autocorrect meets ambient nature noises meets me failing to articulate my voice while talking to myself in the woods.
My phone tended to get my transcription brainstorming session about ninety percent right… and then seemed to hallucinate a few other things it must have thought I might have said.
One might think that this cause me to be upset, and sure, at first it kind of did.
But then a strange thing happened. A few—not all, but a few—of the typos and misheard corrections started making sense, and too, muddling serendipitously into interesting ideas.
It was nothing revolutionary. No. It was nothing deeply groundbreaking. Yet, somehow—whether is was some algorithm trying to make sense of my rambling ideating or just fortunate murmurings transcribed into something slightly better than gibberish—technology actually did slightly more than I expected when I asked it to help me brainstorm.
It became more than just a digital transcriptionist, it weighed in… perhaps accidentally, but also not lacking in value or merit either.
Terms FROm this POSt
- algorithm
- The modern internet in all its forms is far too large for people to fully manage anymore without the help of automated systems. Any time an unseen calculation weighing our public profiles against what an app, website, or service chooses to show us, one of these automated systems is at work behind the scenes recommending product, ideas, politics, and friends. The invisible hand of fate has turned into a digital calculation so big we can’t understand it, and so complex it is often hauntingly accurate. If you are not afraid of the algorithm and what it has done to our society, you are probably not paying enough attention.
- keyboard
- Maybe it’s for typing. Maybe it’s for coding. Maybe it’s for making music. A bed of buttons arrayed for digital input is my favourite user interface and I’ll write about them often in their many varieties.
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
