Try it and see what happens

“Text Cleaning-Lady,” I said to Siri, the voice-recognition personal assistant on my iPhone.
A text-window quickly appeared.
“What do you want to say?” Siri asked.
“Lollypop took all my needles,” I said.
“Lollypop” is Lollypop Farm, the Rochester area’s humane society. I had a huge box of syringes to inject insulin into my diabetic dog. That dog is now gone, leaving me with 89 bazilyun sealed and unused syringes.
Siri cranked gibberish into her text window — it even included an F-bomb.
“Is this what you want?” she asked.
“Nope!” Gotta be slow and deliberate with Siri.
I tried again: “Lollypop took all my needles.”
This time she got it, but wouldn’t send without me first logging in by thumbprint.
I did that thumbprint thingy a while ago, but no longer use it. It wasn’t reliable; perhaps it is now — I think my iPhone’s operating-system has been upgraded three or four times since.
Back to Ground Zero: login first, then “Text Cleaning-Lady.” “Cleaning-Lady” is what’s in my contacts, although I think I also have her in there by name.
Don’t push Siri too hard. She’d probably get it, but “Cleaning-Lady” I’m more sure she’d get.
Again she got it. Speak slowly and deliberately and she usually does. She even got my text!
BAM! Off it went. My cleaning-lady responded almost immediately. She probably didn’t know I used voice-recognition with Siri.
It was my first Siri text-try. Previously I did texts voice-recognition with followup editing on my iPhone’s virtual keyboard. All I ever did previously with Siri was call people. Siri’s reliable. Microsoft’s “Sync” in my car isn’t. Some calls it successfully makes, e.g. “call Jack,” my brother. Anything else is a wrong number, especially if it’s more than one syllable.
I’m doing what got me as tech-savvy as I am: namely “try it and see what happens;” never any manuals = real men don’t use manuals!
Cleaning-lady’s immediate response started me crying. That’s poor emotional control, a stroke-effect. It’s called “lability;” Google it.
56 long years ago in 1962 when I graduated high-school, stuff like this was utterly unimaginable. Science-fiction, Dick Tracy, I’m interacting with machine intelligence. And I’m still here to experience it.
Sadly my wife isn’t. Too late for her; I’m sure she’d be as interested as me. She died six years ago — another cancer victim.
Can artificial intelligence “try it and see what happens?” Maybe so, but I’m leery. They’re gonna hafta uncurl my cold, dead fingers from the steering-wheel before I allow some self-driving car I’m in do 80 mph bumper-to-bumper. Nor do I want my self-driving car to kill a pedestrian.
Garbage-in, garbage out!
But it’s coming: silicon-based life to replace carbon-based life. I give us perhaps 30-50 years. We’re making our air unbreathable, and will soon flood our lowlands. South FL is doomed, or else will be surrounded by seawalls; at least Mar-a-Lago.
Perhaps the only carbon-based life remaining will be insects.
Silicon-based life will worship Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as its creators, its dual God-head. Along with Elvis to make a Trinity.
Will the universe notice? I doubt it. We still keep rolling along, killing perceived enemies. Our planet keep spinning, the Moon keeps circling, and the Sun keeps shinning, as it has billions and billions of years.
So carbon-based life gets replaced by silicon-based life. There’s lots of sand to mine in south Jersey.

• I had a stroke October 26th, 1993 from an undiagnosed heart-defect since repaired. I pretty much recovered. Just tiny detriments; I can pass for never having had a stroke.