Things That Don't Work and the Tail Wagging the Dog

I have a piece out for the Times of London about what Mamdani should do now that he's won. Check it out.

As a man with a seven month old baby, I spend a lot of time typing with one hand, or no hands, while holding a bottle clutched between my neck cheek and my shoulder in just exactly the way we used to do with old corded telephones. Babies strain a lot of things - and, yes, he is still severely straining our capacity to operate without sleep - and one thing my Junho has definitely strained is my ability to do various basic life tasks with my hands full.

Which means I rely heavily on voice-to-text, or speaking into my phone and having it turn my speech into writing - usually for text messages, occasionally for emails, and too often for argumentative Substack Notes. Now voice-to-text is not a technology that’s treated as some sort of vanguard tech, early adopter tech; in fact it’s the kind of affordance that most of us just casually assume is mature and reliable. And yet! I have tested this proposition across multiple empires of consumer electronics - a Samsung Galaxy, a Google Pixel, and my wife’s iPhone, all of them expensive flagship phones - and I can confidently report that in all cases the voice-to-text tech is janky, inconsistent, and a constant source of absurd errors. My friends and family are used to receiving texts like “buy more brain jelly baby later?” or “goat not sleep now why” - both of those are real examples, for the record - and they just nod along, like, “Poor thing, just gets no sleep with his baby, he’s losing his mind.” And, you know, it’s fine. They are patient with me and I am apologetic to them. That’s kind of the societal deal we’ve made with so many technologies: we’ve all quietly agreed to pretend this stuff works. But it doesn’t work. And if we can’t get a phone to correctly hear “bring wipes” instead of “brain wives,” then maybe, just maybe, we’re not ready for all sorts of other incredible technological feats that are perpetually just around the corner.

Take recent assurances that we have reached the magical age of real-time machine translation - you talk, “AI” (algorithms) translate what you say for the other person, they speak, they do the same for you.