Technology to the Rescue
I am getting a little older and I am finding that there are more and more things that are popular that I simply just don’t get. I’m from the 1990’s and when Al Gore invented the internet, it was just a fun way to keep up with family and play fantasy football. Well, it’s 30 years later, and the latest thing is the push for more artificial intelligence, simply known as A.I. I'm fairly sure the A.I. craze will lead to a hostile robot takeover but, in the meantime, I do wonder how we could utilize it around here for what we do!
Remembering Outs in an Inning
Let’s start with something simple. We can utilize this technology to keep track of how many outs are in an inning because I have seen Missionary Athletes forget this about 8,065 times! Drumming up the technology to help our teams count all the way to three shouldn’t be too hard but the real question is how does the A.I. respond when we mess up? The obvious answer is electrical shock, but we can also set it up so that MA's hotel room keycard will deactivate if they forget the number of outs while they are on a Crusade!
Virtual Assistant
Siri and Alexa make it easy for people to ask A.I. questions. Of course we can come up with our own version, and we will use it for common questions that are important to our prison visits such as: “Hey A.I., is it legal in Chillicothe, OH to cut across someone’s back yard to get back on the main road if you are running late?” or “Hey A.I., by random chance is there ANYWHERE to eat within 70 miles of Morgan, GA that doesn’t specialize in catfish?”
Patterns
One of the things that A.I. monitors is patterns so it can make better decisions. We can program the A.I. to notice the pattern of 36 years of playing sports in prison, so that we know what sport to play to guarantee that we will win when we show up! If we are traveling in Indiana and have Don Conner with us, we will know that we should play basketball. If we are indoors in a rain delay and have Wayne Hinkson with us, we know we will dominate in Trivial Pursuit. And anywhere in the country - regardless of the conditions - if we have Dave Cogliano, it will tell us we have better odds of winning a game involving competitive eating!
Writing this Article
This is my 26th article and I'm still on the hot seat to get canceled at any moment! I’m sure we can get a robot, plug it into the wall, and he can write delightful little articles like this better than I can. However, “Inside the Mind of T-1000” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it!
