The Uncanny Valley of Input Technology: A look at “Old Bay in the Key of Predictive Text” by Martha Silano
When I read Martha Silano’s poem, “Old Bay in the Key of Predictive Text,” I couldn’t help but reflect on my own frustrations of input technology—the fact that my phone constantly assumes I’m so “ducking” sick of America right now is just one example. Pro-tip: A friend told me you can fix this problem by creating a “Fucking Fuck Fucker” contact in your phone. So now my phone knows that the f-bomb is a dear friend. You’re welcome.
Predictive text can feel a bit Freudian in its choices, and sometimes it can be downright hilarious.
“At least it has a sense
of humor—turned spinach to so ha ha,
doctor to coho, or maybe it has a predilection
for the sea?”
Who doesn’t love the comedy of when autocorrect goes rogue? Don’t we all delight in a good pun? Humans collectively use puns all the time to lift us out of the practical realm and into a realm of humor and abstraction. Creative metaphoric word transformations help us escape from literal directness to a more mysterious space of double meanings and metaphysical thought.
Even though technology glitches on us in all sorts of ways, “Old Bay” plays with the absurdity of when artificial intelligence becomes downright eerie. “Friday to die day: Why?
Is that a prediction? My patience went panther.”
In 1970, a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori described this eerie feeling as an “Uncanny Valley”—that we are enchanted by human-like characteristics of technology, but only up to a point. We don’t want robots so realistic that we can’t tell the difference between Andrew and Android, and we don’t want to feel like our phones possess a consciousness that knows maybe a little too much about us. Has my phone picked up that I’m sick? Does it know when I’m going to die? These questions are inescapable when “glitches” feel more like “slips” that cut a little too close to the truth. It’s no wonder that this can lead to a dramatic dip in comfort level:
“My sibs went sobs, and enough—
am I surprised it went enigma? But when
I typed I managed, how did it go to I am
an angel?”
I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with Martha lately, and we have talked a little bit about God and death. I told her I don’t know if I believe in God anymore, I’m more partial to believe there is a blanket consciousness all around us that we tap in and out of. Maybe clusters of consciousness is the “us” that takes residence in the apartments of our bodies, and we eventually move on into other spaces when our bodies die. “Old Bay” got me thinking, what if our consciousness or subconsciousness interacts similarly with technology in ways we don’t see or understand? Do our phones absorb a little bit of us in some way? I think Martha would say that’s pretty ducking deep.
