We’re getting surrounded. Everywhere you look in the world of technology, AI is cropping up, as if staging to take us over. Between the upcoming Windows 12 and Samsung’s soon to be announced Galaxy 24 line of flagship phones, most of what we read speaks to the inclusion of AI in these devices and platforms and how we’re going to love it.

Well, not me.

Sorry, but I prefer MOI to AI. You can read that as French for ‘me’, or as an analogy for My Own Intelligence, but either way, it boils down to the same thing. I’d rather do it myself.

Being a ‘Boomer’, I came up in a world where a pencil in hand was your word processor, and when the first small battery powered calculators came out, they were banned in the public school system because, as the teachers would tell us, “You’re not always going to have one of those contraptions in your pocket, so you’re better off learning how to do the math in your head.”

In all fairness, they couldn’t possibly have foreseen the cell phones we carry today, which carry more computing power than NASA used to land the craft that enabled Neil Armstrong to place the first human footstep on the surface of the moon. That not withstanding, their point was well taken. It’s much easier and faster to perform everyday calculations in your head than to reach into your pocket for a device to do it for you. If we’re pleased with the server that took care of us in a restaurant, just hand me the bill and I’ll add a generous tip, based on the bill amount. No calculator necessary.

As a writer, I like starting a story on paper and then, once my imagination takes over, racing to keep up with the flow as it comes. If someone reads my work and enjoys it, I’d feel better knowing it actually came from me and not from a device using AI and machine learning to fill paragraphs.