Why are computers so stupid?

I know, I know. Hardly an original topic for a column. It’s like the Daily Mail running a front page about asylum seekers, or the Express leading on shock new Diana facts. It doesn’t even count as observational comedy. ‘Computers, eh? How stupid are they? What’s that about?’ Silence. Tumbleweed. Not even Patrick Kielty could pass that off as material.

Seriously, though. Why are computers so stupid? The Mac is clearly, by some margin, the least stupid, yet it’s still relentlessly dull-witted. Just now I inserted a blank DVD and dragged some files onto it. Did Mac OS X copy them onto the DVD? It did not. It created shortcuts. Come on! The weakest of editorial interns could have fathomed that I wanted to burn the files. What sort of babbling loon would create a DVD of shortcuts?* Yet my Mac, or ‘dur-brain’ as I affectionately call it, assumes I’m exactly that sort of babbling loon. Pot? Kettle? Talking of which, the buggers can’t make coffee either.

It’s been said that a failure to respond intuitively is an inevitable feature of any non-sentient data processing system, although it’s sometimes put in different words, especially after a Microsoft Entourage database crash loses all your email along with those mobile phone photos of Leona from Marketing at the Christmas party. But before we stereotype computers as dumbos, we have to consider nurture as well as nature. Maybe there’s a lot of stupidity in their environment. Do computers become stupid by hanging out with stupid people?

To assess the ambient stupidity level, let’s take a look at Google’s top ten search terms of 2007. Incidentally, these aren’t the most popular overall, but the ‘fastest rising’. By publicising this particular breakdown, Google cleverly excludes all the porn searches, which are unlikely to change much from year to year unless Paris Hilton grows a new orifice.

Anyway, number 1 on the list is ‘iphone’. Now, what kind of idiot needed to use Google to find stuff about the iPhone in 2007? Was it actually possible to get out of bed, drag yourself to a computer, open a web browser and type ‘iphone’ without already having been assailed by a dozen offers to tell you about the iPhone, sell you an iPhone, unlock your iPhone, add you to a class action suing Apple for disabling your unlocked iPhone, or tell you where to buy a new iPhone to replace the one Apple disabled?

It gets worse. Also among the fastest rising searches was ‘facebook’. Now, unless I’m much mistaken, Facebook is a website. You’re in a web browser, you want Facebook, you type ‘facebook’. Why the blinking Nora would you have to go to Google and look it up?

Three possibilities spring to mind. These words may have been part of more complex searches, so all those people might have entered ‘facebook’ quite naturally when searching for answers to things like ‘do office drones really think saying “facebook me!” to people they meet in pubs makes them more interesting than their conversation would otherwise imply’.

Or maybe they intended to go straight to Facebook, but were using Firefox with that incredibly annoying default Google home page that hijacks the text cursor, so the URL you’ve already started typing ends up as a search instead of an address. Except if that were the case the listed word would have been ‘acebook’, closely followed in the rankings by ‘ucking Firefox why does it do that’.

The third possibility is that Googlers really are stupid. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that several of the other fastest rising search terms are also websites, including ‘youtube’, ‘myspace’ and ‘club penguin’. I suppose computer illiteracy could be to blame rather than actual stupidity, but think about it: anyone looking for Club Penguin is either a child, a paedophile, or has no life. And those are three social groups that generally know their way around computers.

Here again, though, there could be more than meets the eye. Parents, for example, entering ‘how to cancel Club Penguin credit card subscription while convincing kids technical fault is to blame’. Or 1980s biscuit fans looking up ‘Club Penguin Digestive Hobnob Wagon Wheel’. You never know.

So my research is inconclusive. It may not be our fault that computers are so stupid. On the other hand, as I write this, the Mail on Sunday has just put out two million free copies of The Jazz Singer on discs that aren’t proper DVDs and are no more use to anyone with a slot-loading drive than a yoghurt carton lid with ‘Mawkish Neil Diamond movie’ scribbled on it. The rationale is that they’re ‘environmentally friendly’. Which is a bit like advertising a chocolate teapot as ‘quiet’.

Be honest. If you stuck one of these freebie frisbees in your Mac and it refused to play it, who’d be the chump?

Adam Banks once failed a Turing test.

First published in MacUser, 1 February 2008

Tagged as: Computing, Google, Internet, Mac, MacUser, Media