I’ve been resisting AI up until very recently. At this point I can no longer ignore it. It’s everywhere and in everything. I have a very automated home with smart things everywhere. At first (and sometimes still) AI actually made some devices “dumber”. I’d request things that once worked fine, such as “Hey Google, turn on pantry lights” and I’d get a response back saying “I’m sorry, I can’t do that”, when it always worked before when I didn’t have AI enabled. At this point it’s no longer so bad. Now it at least tries, and if it can’t do something it will ask for more details rather that flatly reject the request.

It’s scary, at least to me, how quickly it’s advancing too. I’m using AI in Google Fit / FitBit now for my daily walks and exercise, and once or twice a day it summarizes my daily activity, suggests little changes to my routine, and tells me how I’m doing. It’ll even often refer back to things and details I previously provided in my feedback. I don’t respond to it often, but occasionally it’ll ask me a question and I’ll reply to it just to see how it responds. It’s getting closer and closer to sounding like there’s a human on the other end acting as my health and fitness coach. Creepy.

A lot of the apps I use (probably more than I think) use AI constantly now, especially Amazon, many other shopping apps, and photo apps. Even the camera in my S26 uses it. My FitBit reminds me several times a day when I forget to get up and move, to walk at least 250 steps per hour. How the heck am I supposed to watch a 90-minute or 1-hour movie?! And what if I were in a theater?

Actually, I haven’t been to a theater since before COVID. During and after that time I upgraded most of our TVs to bigger and better versions, and created a pretty comfy theater experience right here at home, and it has served us pretty well thus far. I can pause it when I need a bathroom or snack break, and rewind when I miss something or need some clarification. Can’t do that at a theater. The only things we miss are the crowd reactions and the movie theater popcorn. But I think I recently resolved the latter with the popcorn shown in the photo above. We tried several different popcorn poppers over the years as well as several types of pre-popped popcorn, but we’ve found that this Palo seems to be the closest we’ve tasted yet. It’s even as messy as authentic theater buttered popcorn. We love it. It’s probably (definitely) not the healthiest popcorn option, but mmm is it good! We save it for the blockbuster movies.

The navigation app I use in our car uses AI for just about everything now too. To report traffic issues, road work, or police taking radar you used to click an icon, then get a list of other icons, and you’d click the one most appropriate to the issue you’re reporting. Now you just click a generic icon and AI asks you to explain the issue as you drive. You explain it in as much or as little detail as you want to provide, it chews on that, then explains what it understands as your request and you either confirm that it is correct, add followup information, or cancel the whole damned request in frustration. I’ve gotten used to it at this point, and it has actually become very easy and much simpler that before when I need to report a speed limit correction around town. It works well too – the AI will send the correction to a “Waze Map Editor”, which is a real person in the area, to verify the correction. Sometimes later the same day, or usually the next day I’ll get a response from a map editor either asking for a few more details (like the beginning and ending crossroads of the speed limit correction) or letting me know that they have made the correction already.

When you get a new smartphone these days everyone has to deal with AI. By default now, they even setup the POWER button to activate AI when you click it! I’m not quite to that point yet though, so that’s pretty much the very first change I make. I look up how to change the Power button back to the Power Off settings when you long-press it, and how to simply turn off the screen by clicking it, and I switch it back to that–like NORMAL. They really expect you to use AI and say “Turn off my phone” or “Power off my phone”, or pull down the Quick panel two times, then click the “Power” icon? Nope, not me. Yet.