on 15 August 2008How much should we let computers do, and what should we leave to humans? Microsoft Word’s grammar checker it was that provoked me to wonder thus.
To its credit, it didn’t object to that last sentence, and plenty of people would. Which could lure you into believing, quite falsely, that maybe Word has a clue about written style. It even had the good judgement not to flag that sentence fragment starting with ‘which’, the kind of easy pickings that grammar checkers might be expected to pounce on like mobile speed camera cops on a downhill stretch of urban dual carriageway with an unsignposted 30 limit. But these occasional examples of judicious restraint are attributable, I’m afraid, more to lethargy than discretion.
And on out my elbow the wonky off badger what. See? No green lines under that one. (Not even colourless ones sleeping furiously, Chomsky fans.) Had it been properly meaningful but rendered in the passive voice, however, Word’s wrath would surely have been felt, since that’s one of the prissy style no-nos it was designed to catch. Except that, despite being set to flag passive sentences, it completely missed that last one. A mistake was made.
Blimey, the passive voice is no longer detected at all. Has that pointless but persistent feature become broken in Office 2008? Like just about everything else? Word isn’t even moaning about verbless sentences now. (Although the spelling checker has redlined ‘verbless’, brainlessly.) Which is odd. Very odd.
Ah, ‘Very odd’ isn’t a proper sentence, Word tells me now. But all the rest are. Including, this. Superfluous comma and all. Hang on – ‘Superfluous comma and all’ gets flagged as a fragment, but ‘Including, this’ is a well-formed sentence, apparently. Was it Word marking this year’s SATs?
So computers are no good at checking copy. Then again, nor are humans, according to the Times columnist Giles Coren, some of whose amusingly intemperate emails to errant subeditors were made public last month. Changing one word in his restaurant review provoked a tirade of more than a thousand, some of them not printable in this magazine. In a more lucid passage, Coren likens the person responsible to ‘a plasterer restoring a Renaissance fresco and thinking Jesus looks [expletive deleted] with a bear so plastering over it.’ I haven’t been able to find a fresco showing Jesus and a bear, so it’s possible he meant ‘beard’. That’s why we need subeditors, Miles.
As both a writer and a sub, I should be unbiased in such matters, but I always find myself siding with the writer – even when it’s Michael Winner, who gets a pasting in Piers Morgan’s book, The Insider, for complaining about his Daily Mirror copy being translated into tabloidese. ‘Calm down, dear, it’s only a bit of rephrasing,’ you might think. But Winner was right, because, unlike most journalists, columnists are hired for their writing style. And Coren was right because someone had wrongly decided he knew better than the respected author whose work he was checking. (Sadly, there’s no such thing as a respected subeditor. Grudgingly tolerated, maybe.)
At least Giles had someone to swear at. When computers screw up, they have, to paraphrase the first Baron Thurlow (1731–1806), no soul to be damned and no arse to be kicked. Fortunately, we all know the computer isn’t always right, if only because some ignorant human has given it a bum steer. There’s a database in Durham that will never, ever believe my mother-in-law has paid her Council Tax, but the ladies in the office know it’s wrong. The more we rely on computers as the ultimate authority, however, the greater the temptation to pretend they’re infallible, just because it’s quicker and easier than second-guessing them.
When Amanda Hodgson, a law-abiding mother of three, was told in July that she couldn’t help out at her kids’ school because she was a heroin addict with convictions for assaulting police officers, her friendly local civil servants didn’t chuckle and sort it out. Instead, they told her she’d have to submit passport photos, attend a police interview and be fingerprinted to prove she wasn’t the same Amanda Hodgson. Innocent until proven guilty? The computer says no.
If this failure of common sense is happening with data as simple as names, things can only get worse. More advanced data processing systems, highlighted recently by targeted marketing schemes such as Phorm and Facebook Beacon, use far more complex information to make decisions we may never be aware of – until we realise we’re paying 1.5% higher interest than next door, our car insurance has twice the excess, and our youngest child has to go to school in Portsmouth.
As stupid as people can be, allowing them and their kickable arses to be edited out by soulless technologies is the kind of progress – and I hope Word is listening here – up with which we should not put.
Adam Banks once tried turning the grammar checker on, but she slapped him.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper