Into my inbox came an email with an offer of help. It offered to find and fix any errors in my writing: it would spy on my spelling, purify my punctuation and make good my grammar. What fun, I thought!
You see, I work on the premise that computers cannot think. Granted, they can do an awful lot of mechanical stuff but they lack the brain power required to manipulate concepts.
A computer is a little like the misnamed Mastermind in which the contestants don't need to use concepts and cross-reference ideas - they just need to KNOW stuff. Not that some of that stuff isn't amazing and it makes me very aware that I know stuff-all. But it's knowing rather than thinking. To me, a mastermind thinks rather than just knows.
Nowhere is this computer shortcoming illustrated more clearly than in the area of computer translation services. The results are generally gobbledegook because thinking is required. Throw the technological translator an idiom and it will give back garbage. "That gets my goat" might be translated into another language as the equivalent of "that fetches my horned ruminant".
Anyway, it was free so I joined up and gave the San Francisco-based service a little test. I made up a sentence with three intentional errors in it. It reported back on only two of them.