As you type a few letters to respond to an email, up pops a suggestion for the rest of the word or sentence. As you head to bed you ask your smart speaker to turn off the kitchen light, and it inquires if you want to turn off others on the same floor. After you finish a movie from your Netflix queue, it suggests additional films you might like. The Police used it as a title of a number one album, but the term can actually be credited to philosopher Gilbert Ryle: it makes you think there truly are ghosts in the machine.
Of course, it's not a really an independent entity nor an ethereal being. Rather, it's a blend of artificial intelligence and a massive database of choices. Based on your history of prior selects, the systems take a stab at what you might like as a follow up. It happens on YouTube and Amazon and Spotify: if you liked that one, there's a good chance you will love this one as well. That a computer can anticipate your next desire is either brilliant or creepy, and in truth a little of both.
There is another way of looking at it: you are simply boring.
We all have innumerable habits that enable those around us to predict what we will do or say or eat next. With some it's the same yogurt and fruit for breakfast, or a stop at Starbucks for a Venti decaf cappuccino with extra foam and a shot of hazelnut syrup and a sprinkle of cinnamon. If your spouse puts the former on the counter when they hear your shower finish, or the cashier recognizes you and punches in your order without you having to say anything, are they predicting the future? Are they analyzing the myriad choices you could make and then using deductive reasoning narrowing the funnel down to the most likely outcome? Or are they merely reacting to your lack of adventurousness? Rather than going from the top down that is the universe of possibilities, are they going from the bottom up, knowing you are you and ain't never gonna change?
Not to fret: you are hardly alone. A study published in PLOS Computational Biology assessed more than 3400 people from ages 4 to 91 as to how complex and random their thoughts were. It found that the ability to be "cognitively complex" peaks at 25. It thereafter begins a slow and steady decline to age 60, after which it starts to drop much faster. Note that this doesn't imply one's mental abilities are compromised in any way: not their memory, not their ability to reason, not their computational nor problem-solving skills. Only that their ability to come up with random, spontaneous ideas declines over time.
On the flip side, being boring also means your mind may be freed up for other things. Studies from the Academy of Management and others demonstrate that being bored actually increases creativity. Sandi Mann, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. and the author of "The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good" says that at its simplest boredom is "a search for neural stimulation that isn't satisfied. And if we can't find that, our mind will create it." The theory is that if you don't have to expend brainpower to be creative in some areas it frees you up to stretch in others. And so boring people can actually outperform artists and others who have to be creative all the time. Basically, all that time saved in having a turkey sandwich everyday for lunch can translate into truly interesting ideas at dinner.
Or not. If the last 2 years have taught us anything it's how easy it is to try new things, but then just as quickly to make them routine. Be it what we wear, what we eat, how we work or what we do after hours, they've all been upended, and then just as quickly solidified back to the new business as usual. It's so much easier to stay home and watch Netflix than go out. And now our excuses for not doing or trying new things can be rationalized not in our resistance to change but in public health. Put another way, we can now say we are not being boring, we're just being safe.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford tries to try things. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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