What technology would you be better off without, and why?
Autocorrect. Ugh.
I hardly ever used to make spelling mistakes but, since the invention of Autocorrect, despite the fact that it’s supposed to FIX this kind of thing, I make them all the time. And some of them are absolute howlers.
The worst was when I messaged a friend whose cat was sick, and I wrote, “Sending lots of love to you and the dear boy”. Except that Autocorrect changed “dear” to “dead”. My friend’s husband contacted me to say, “Erm, I know you didn’t mean to do this, but …” and was very nice about it, but it didn’t stop me from feeling absolutely mortified.
Oh, and their cat did actually die after that.
Autocorrect has been known to change Louis Catorze’s name to “Louis Caterers” or “Louis Carthorse” and, frustratingly, every time I upgrade my phone it’s like starting from scratch with commonly-used (by me, anyway) words that the system doesn’t recognise. I have had my current phone for four months and I probably type “Catorze” more often than I type “and” or “the”, yet it’s only just got to the stage of accepting the name exactly the way I type it.
It is less accepting, however, of the Unrepeatable Expletives used by Cat Daddy to refer to his boy, as this post proves.
Autocorrect may well fix common misspellings and make poor spellers better, but if, in doing so, it makes good spellers worse, then it’s not fit for purpose and it can duck right off.
