Just How Dumb Are We?

Two odd things happened almost simultaneously last night. They arrived like a one-two punch of blinding illumination, the bad kind, where you wind up on your ass in the gutter, seeing stars.

The first came around nine o’clock, when I got an email from my friend Pat, who made an interesting observation: The first name of the five-year-old asylum seeker from Ecuador whom a judge ordered freed from ICE custody, is “Liam.” This, Pat noted, suggested that “this family has been so deeply (or aspirationally) immersed in American culture that they gave their son this trendy American name.”

Right! It is, indeed, trendy: The single most popular baby boy name in the United States.

I hit the “reply” button on my Gmail account, intending to tell Pat that I agreed, and adding some related philosophical and sociopolitical observations of my own.

So my “reply” field opened, and there was already writing in it! It was ready-for-sending, dispatchable via a single push of a button. It said, in its entirety:

Hey Pat,

Good point about Liam. It really says something about assimilation, or maybe just following trends.

Gene.

—

To be clear, I had not written any of those words, nor had I, for some inexplicable reason, signed my name to an email coming from my email address to a friend who knew very well it was coming from me, especially but not exclusively because it was in response to an email she had written to me. Also, I had called her “Pat,” which was similarly unnecessary inasmuch as I was sending my message to “Pat.”

What passed through my mind at that moment was some variant of:

WHAT THE FUCK?

This is apparently a brand-new AI expansion of Gmail. Gmail used to give you a short menu of knee-jerk, two-or-three word responses. Now, they’re going waay further.

Have we become this stupidified? Are we a nation of lazy imbeciles who need quotidian, self-evident, insipid, pointlessly repetitive suggestions for how to respond to messages from friends? This was actually a fear I had already expressed just a few weeks ago, right here, about a trend in AI that I labelled The Cyrano Syndrome.

I went to sleep, deeply ashamed of my species.

Then, at 4 a.m., I had to pee. Rachel had just returned to bed, warning me that the water service to our home was no longer working. I realized it was likely weather-related and neighborhood-wide, and would no doubt remain dysfunctional for many hours. So I shuffled to the bathroom with a 4 a.m. mantra running in my head: “Do not flush. Do not flush. Do not flush.”

Then, I peed.

Then, I flushed.

Then, I gasped, “Aiii!”

Yes, apparently we are that supid, as a species.

—

You know where I am going here, because it is where I always go, these days. So I’ll make it brief. Yes, we are, collectively, morons. We are, as a species, practitioners of myopic thinking and depthless reasoning, so much so that we have elected, twice, an evil, infantile vulgarian dotard as our leader. It’s not just them who did this. It is also us, who watched the train coming and never quite figured out what to do about it. It’s us, who chose leaders of our own — people of our own parties — but then demanded so little of them, or of ourselves.

I think that’s changing, right now. Isn’t it?

It’s bracing. Isn’t it?

—

The next time I peed this morning, I didn’t flush.

Then, I got another another email from another friend, Gary. It noted, dryly, that a New York Times book review had just pompously used the obscure word “materteral,” which is evidently the female equivalent of “avuncular.”

Gmail suggested that I respond thus:

Hey Gary, That's a great find. I've never even heard of that one. Gene.

I killed that idiot thing, replaced it with one of my own, and sent it. It read:

“Gmail can kiss my ass, Gary.”

Gary won’t know what the hell that was about until he reads this column.

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Pool:

Okay, that’s it for today.

WAIT. THIS JUST IN:

Grandpa the Cat is pissed off this morning! We had no water to give her so we gave her ice. As you can see, she HATES ICE. (So do we.)

Maybe you could do this before you go?