Summary Of Geoffrey Pullum's Artificial Stupidity

In the article “Artificial Stupidity” linguist Geoffrey Pullum states his opinions on artificial intelligence and how his every day interactions with simple technology affect his opinions on this. He starts his article by reciting a log of the redundancies of specific user-interfaces that he encounters throughout a five day period. Most of these interactions are with simple appliances such as a projector giving a notification that it will go to standby mode in “one minutes” or a self-checkout machine asking him to
“Insert cash or select payment type” after he has chosen to with cash. He then goes on to state that based off these interactions, he’s certain that all technology isn’t capable of communicating with humans on an intellectual level
The second thing this man doesn’t understand about creating user-interfaces is the time and money it would take for people to program these prompts that would satisfy his
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user experience with technology; Especially with most of his nitpicky complaints. In his article, Pullum talked about the redundancy of an elevator someone being alone in an elevator and it announcing the direction in which it was going. This was obviously added to allow new passengers a moment to get off before they are swept in the opposite of the direction that they need to go. This doesn’t really help someone if they are the only person on the elevator, but to develop the technology to sense the amount of people in the elevator would be hard to justify. When you like at it from and business standpoint, you have to ask why you would need this and how could you make money from developing this. It would be possible to use existing technologies to help quicken the development of this, but then you’d have to pay the companies that developed those technologies. Same with the previously mentioned self-checkout machine. From a business perspective, no one in their right mind would spend the money and time