Nicole Junkerman
Reflections
Nicole Junkerman on Artificial Intelligence in Everyday Life
The version most people actually meet is quiet, unglamorous and already in the room. A week spent noticing it, and one plain test for what deserves to stay.
The version most people actually meet is quiet, unglamorous and already in the room. A week spent noticing it, and one plain test for what deserves to stay.
The phrase arrives with a great deal of noise attached to it, and most of that noise is about the future. The version that turns up on an ordinary Tuesday is smaller and considerably duller. A phone that guesses the next word. A map that reroutes around a closed road before the driver has noticed there is one. A camera that finds the faces before it finds the focus. None of it announces itself, and almost all of it is already there.
Nicole Junkerman has been keeping a short note this autumn of the moments in a day that were settled by a machine rather than by a person. The list turned out to be longer than expected and less dramatic than expected at the same time, which is a useful pair of findings. Junk post that never arrived because something sorted it away. A photograph found by typing one word into a search box. A train app that knew about a delay before the platform did.
What the note makes plain is that the helpful version of this technology works almost entirely at the boring end of the day. It sorts, it suggests, it finds the thing that was put down somewhere sensible and then lost. It is not doing the interesting part. The interesting part is still reading the book, writing the letter, choosing the route, and deciding whether to go at all.
That is worth saying, because the conversation tends to skip it. Grand claims are easier to write about than small conveniences, and small conveniences are what nearly everybody actually meets. Four minutes saved on a Tuesday is not a story. Four minutes saved every day is most of an evening by the end of the month, and an evening is a real thing, unlike a forecast.
The other plain finding is how little of it gets noticed while it is happening. Convenience is designed to be invisible and it succeeds. The notebook method works here as well as it works on books: write the small thing down at the time, because nobody remembers it afterwards. A week of that is enough to see the shape of it.
None of this requires a position for or against. A kettle is not a philosophy, and most of what gets described as intelligence around an ordinary house is closer to a kettle than to anything else. What is worth having instead is the habit of asking, every so often, which of these small helps genuinely hands time back, and which quietly takes it again somewhere else. A suggestion that saves a decision is a gift. A suggestion that replaces one is worth a second look.
The test Nicole Junkerman keeps returning to is simple, and it is not about the technology at all. After an hour of it, is there more attention left over, or less. Reading answers that question honestly, which is one reason the reading room remains the least automated corner of the week. A long afternoon with a book has never once suggested what to do next, and that is the whole point of it.
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