Smart Devises**, Non-Smart Users?

Going through my Facebook feed I am saddened by what our gadgets have reduced us into.  My friend has crafted a very great status that his fellow 2000 or so friends wouldn’t resist clicking the like button but they won’t. Guess why? His auto-correct had something different in mind!  Our elephant thumbs on tiny touch keypads only make the situation worse!

Modern day devices come equipped with auto-correct features among other features that make us part with colossal sums of cash that we wouldn’t have even thought of raising in the first place. On auto correction, life has become so simple. Who needs to master the spelling of a 10 letter word in a language that’s not his first?  Suffice it to say we now have prosthetic brains in these gadgets.

Human language is way too complex for a machine to comprehend; only a human brain can. The end product i.e. utterances or sentences are after complex processes in the human brain; that’s why you should never trust a gadget to interfere with what you want to say or write. Let’s cut a long story short by a few illustrations.

My brother, who lives in Kigali, is leaving tonight.

My brother who lives in Kigali is leaving tonight.

Both of the above sentences are properly punctuated, however the semantic bearing of the two sentences isn't the same owing to the different positions of the comma. While in the first sentence the words between the commas aren’t critical to the meaning, in the second one the same words, without a comma have a lot to do with the meaning of the whole sentence. In fact, auto-correct features don’t help much where punctuation is concerned save for offering you capital letters after the full stop.

It’s quite obvious that auto-correct won’t be of much help when using proper nouns, especially when dealing with our African names. Sometimes, especially on mobile phones, these grammar/spell checkers wont detect when you improperly use homonyms  such as there and their which we can extend to you’re and your; everyone who minds grammar can bear me witness how this** are annoying in text messages or on social media.

we've all been in such a situation thought not this awkward!

Till when are we going to allow the very devices we use to tweet call our audience (tweeps) twerps?  It can be awkward in text messaging. We already know how difficult text messaging is since we don’t have the facial expressions and other non-verbal cues to complement our messages; I need not talk of the catastrophe that befalls someone when they blindly follow their devises**, or to be fair to the users; when there devices have better ideas.

Clearly artificial intelligence cannot replace the human competence in language; I am yet to mention computer translation and speech translation where computer scientists are using an almost similar technology as the one in spelling and grammar checkers. The algorithms used in these use probability and statistics; perfection would require a replica of the model of the human language, any good student of Noam Chomsky, can tell you how (im)possible this is! Chomsky’s view on the same would require a different page!

Back to spell/grammar checkers, let’s see how many modern grammar checkers will properly correct the poem below, created for old auto corrects.

This is the best Microsoft word can offer:

Eye halves a spelling checker
it came with my pea sea.
It plainly marks four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a word and weight for it to say
Weather eye yam wrong or write.
It shows me strait a weigh as soon as a mist ache is maid.
It nose bee fore two long and eye can put the error rite.
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it,
I am shore your pleased to no.
Its letter perfect all the way.
My checkers told me sew.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t use auto correct, use it but don’t trust it; unless you believe your device is smarter that you, but in this age of Google and Android, I wouldn’t be surprised! I personally prefer turning off my auto-correct features than letting these probabilistic guesses from mindless devices mess my texts. Now help me identify where in this text I deliberately let Microsoft office 2010 decide for me, or where it failed to save me.

** Auto correct fails in this article