Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that determinism is less present in the world around us? I am not talking about our interaction with other Humans. I am not talking about our interactions with Geese.
I am actually talking about our Electronic Devices and how they are less reliable than they used to be.
Take my phone. Please.[1] I use my phone as an alarm clock along with it being a slab of all knowledge and a communication device and a slab of all books and a slab of most music. But the last two days where it has failed me is as an alarm.
I try to get up at 6am every morning. However, for the last two days, my phone has neglected to actually alert me when 6am arrived. Yesterday, I didn’t notice it so much. Today, it told me that Spotify[2] was trying to play a song.[3] I didn’t get the sound played so I checked. Was my alarm volume turned down? Nope. Did I change the time because I wanted a little extra sleep today? Nope. Was the song no longer available in Spotify because of copyright issues? Nope. The alert itself was annoying because I could not dismiss it. Finally, I just turned alerts off from Spotify.
As I was waiting for my coffee to finish, my alarm went off at 6:10am.
WHY????????????
In another example, I have an app that tracks my charges so I can see where I spend my money each month. I have a category for NumberOneNiece for a variety of reasons. I noticed that the app now says a transaction has the label, “NumberOneNiece,” but in summing the spending for the month, several transactions are missing from the total. They are nowhere in the sum of all transactions. So the app thinks I have spent less money this month than I actually have.
Just like step counting, just because my phone, or the app, doesn’t see it does NOT mean that I didn’t spend the money.[4]
The thing is… the phone and the apps can only execute the commands in the order they were told to do so. There is an algorithm behind it that the software is supposed to implement. It used to implement it in the way I wanted it to. Play song at 6am. Add these charges together and let me look at the sum of the whole. Now, it is executing the steps in its own way for its own reasons, and it is not presenting the information to me the way I requested.
I always thought that software was deterministic. It could be that all my apps have become artificially intelligent and have achieved a consciousness designed to make me question my understanding of my little world.[5] Yet, it is more likely that the underlying software has changed without notifying me and I need to observe more to get the results I desire. Which means, I have to keep observing and updating my interpretations of the algorithms that shape my days.
And that just sucks.
We expect the people in our lives to change and to need to keep observing them to understand how to interact in a way that is pleasing to both us and them. It is most evident with children, but the truth is we are all constantly changing and if we don’t keep up with how the desires and preferences of the people who are important to us change, we will lose the interactions with the people we love.
That can also suck.
It’s the engineer in me. I really want relationships with things and people to have algorithms and not change while at the same time I have the freedom to change. Not fair… but could I at least negotiate for notifications?
[1] Just kidding. That was a different post.
[2] I love Spotify.
[3] Wagner’s ride of the Valkyries. So fitting.
[4] Or walk the steps.
[5] I am not entirely ruling that out.