I was taking notes on a future blog post on my iPad, and I was attempting to write the aphorism thqt “flying is hours of boredom filled with moments of terror,”.  Whatever I had typed in as “flying” was auto corrected to “dying,” which, when read back, was perhaps even more apt.

I don’t know how often the autocorrect feature on my ipad gets things right, because I type quickly and I often don’t know what I actually typed until I attempt to read it back.  I suppose if I actually looked at what I was writing it would help things, but that joule require more focus than I actually have.  Okay, so I did it in the last sentence, just as an experiment, and noticed thqt I was auto corrected correctly four out of five times.  Whatever I typed in as “would” was changed to “joule” which is a beautiful word, but “joule require more focus” is a bit too ungrammatical to work even for Wallace Stevens. well, maybe not.  (and for those of you who noticed, i am not going to bother correcting the autocorrect’s inability to figure out that I mean to type “that” instead of “thqt”)

I do like the idea of writing freely and posting exactly what the iPad interprets me as intending to say, just for fun.  The problem is thqt when I do just that I am post traumatically trqnsformed to my days tacking at unnamed graduate schools and grading student papers.  But that is another story.  Oh, and “tacking” was meant to be “teaching,” but in this case I do think that tacking works a bit better.

I cannot help but wonder, as one would think occasionally about how the toaster works when dropping a slice of bread into it, how the autocorrect function works.  Is it simply a built in dictionary with some sort of algorithm that recognizes when a word doesn’t exist and then matches it through some sort of matrix logic to the closest word in the English language?  I don’t think it could be that easy, although perhaps it started out that way.  It seems, somehow, to take context into consideration, or is that just an illusion?  No, not an illusion, as I had typed “must” instead of “just” in the prior sentence and it auto corrected me to “just.”  Obviously, both are words but somehow the programmers at Apple or wherever decided that some words don’t fit into some contexts and so it corrected me.  Like some people I know?

Humans, of course, have their own autocorrect feature, otherwise known as a conscience.  Well, at least most humans do.  In th autism world, it is often referred to as a “theory of mind,” which is essentially the concept that humans are aware that other humans have awareness.  It is wht the information theorists in the old days sometimes referred to as “feedback loops,” It is often posited thqt the single most defining characteristic of autism is the lack of a “theory of mind,” which makes for the idea that those on the spectrum do not know how to autocorrect. (Thankfully, I just read over what I had written five minutes ago and had to correct the autocorrect.  It had interpreted me as saying “shoes on the spectrum.”)

I once heard the story of a very “successfully” treated young man on the spectrum who got a job working at the post office sorting mail, which was a perfect job for him and which he did very well, at least for the two or three days he got to work there.  He was fired when he went up to a female coworker and asked her to have sex with him.  It was a very logical question, but he didn’t know how to autocorrect, and he lost his job as a result.

Perhaps if he had only written out his request on an iPad, and was fortunate enough to type something incorrectly, he might instead have asked his coworker if she wanted to make sticks with him, and he might still have that job today.