A.I. – Artificial Indignation

Recent news reports of “exploding” iPhones have got me a mite concerned. Because quite frankly, my iPhone is temperamental enough.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that electronic gadgets have personalities of their own. How else would you explain my vindictive clock radio? I’m serious. As  I am not a still sleeper, every now and then, in the dead of night, some kind of frenetic jerk of my arm will send a pillow careening (can pillows careen?) into the bedside table, which will knock everything on it to the ground. The clock radio, the lamp, my watch, an Ayn Rand novel (okay, that last one is a lie – I just wanted to look cultured) – all sent clattering into the wall, and then into a heap on the floor.

Every time this happens, without fail, the ricocheting of the clock radio against wall, lamp, watch, literary classic (okay, no) and floor will mysteriously press just the right sequence of buttons to set an alarm to go off offensively loudly at some time between 3:30am and 5:30am, usually on an aggressive AM talkback station. This has happened more than once, and every time I reset the radio back the way it was. But it keeps happening. You can’t tell me this is just amazing coincidence every time.

It Is Aware, And It Is Angry.

There’s more. I once had a dvd player that flatly refused to play the movie Deep Blue Sea. It would play every other movie I owned, and the dvd itself worked in everyone else’s dvd players – but my particular machine was opposed, on principle, to playing that movie. (And fair enough too, it was fairly rubbish. But dammit, if I wanted judgment from inanimate objects, I’d step on my bathroom scales more often.)

It Is Aware, And It Has Taste.

And then there’s my iPhone. My fundamentalist Christian iPhone. At least, I assume it’s a fundamentalist Christian iPhone. It loses reception at the first sign of me talking about something even remotely in the vicinity of sex; it pretty much flat-out refuses to work AT ALL on a Sunday, and sometimes it makes me feel guilty for no apparent reason at all.

It Is Aware, And It Condemns.

Now that I think about it, even my laptop has a personality – except in a new twist, it appears to be imbued with a duplicate of an already existing person’s personality, Dollhouse style. See, technically it does everything it is supposed to do fairly efficiently, and with a base level of competence – but there’s something just…off about it. Like it knows it’s on its last legs, and is clinging desperately to its remaining shred of relevance. And every now and then it does something unexpectedly bizarre. But not in an impressive way – it doesn’t actually ruin my day, it’s just a little off-putting, and leaves me scratching my head.

My laptop is Tyra Banks.

It Is Aware…Eh, But Only Just.