Unfortunately, often it ends up being very annoying when the computer tries to be smart. Not to say it can't be done, but the PC's helping hand is not always welcome.
Yeah, when a program tries to be smart and repeatedly, helpfully "corrects" what you're doing, it often just gets in the way or corrupts your work.
Word is the first example that comes to mind (for myself, and many people). One such situation is they way that git just punts on hard merge decisions - coming up with accurate heuristics for complex merging is very difficult, but the programmer responsible for the merged content can usually make the decisions easily. This frees git up to focus instead on storing and propagating those decisions well.
A part of the problem is the top-down mandated idea of what is "correct." If these things can be adaptive in a non-intrusive way, then it can all be like "teh" and "MIstake." I would love to stop telling new word processors to stop correcting Smalltalk. I wonder if there's any way to keep information like that around with you? I can try to do 100% of my word processing on Google docs, but, am I ever going to get there?
Preferences like this need to be tended by operating systems. If I tell one text editor widget about "Smalltalk," there's no reason why all of them across the system shouldn't know about it.
Fully agree - I'm much more receptive if I get a little notificiation saying 'new feature, wanna see?'.
I actually thought Microsoft's Clippy was a really good idea in principle; where they went wrong was in giving Clippy's options the appearance of a modal dialog, which people thought they needed to respond to. Also, screen resolutions were typically lower so Clippy took up an undue amount of visual real estate, to the point of being intrusive. But the context-sensitive task helper is now seen on many applications, as is some kind of anthropomorphic assistant on many web pages.
No kidding. I've scheduled stuff at 2am before. Sometimes it's just "fetch laundry from dryer before bed" but once or twice it's been a phone call with people traveling on the other side of the world. "Intelligence" would be at best unhelpful and at worst disastrous.
When there are useful defaults, or usefully filtered and arranged options that we can override if we like, we see the software as smart. When the software thinks it knows better than we do, then it's not really "helping."
My point is that there is a person who created the software who deserves the blame. You can't talk about a computer being smart at all. Either the programmer was smart or they weren't.
