{"id":25543,"date":"2020-01-11T12:18:55","date_gmt":"2020-01-11T17:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=25543"},"modified":"2019-12-30T17:57:44","modified_gmt":"2019-12-30T22:57:44","slug":"when-does-the-great-age-of-machine-intelligence-reach-our-desktop-computers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/11\/when-does-the-great-age-of-machine-intelligence-reach-our-desktop-computers\/","title":{"rendered":"When does the great age of machine intelligence reach our desktop computers?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Turning Google Contacts into address labels for Christmas\/New Year&#8217;s cards is a task that I expected to be simple. The plan was <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>export to &#8220;Google CSV&#8221; format<\/li><li>upload to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.avery.com\/\">avery.com<\/a> to generate a PDF for printing<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>This fails because the Google export process produces a CSV file with nearly 100 columns, which is too many for the Avery system to handle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No problem, open in Microsoft <em>Excel <\/em>and cut down to about 5 columns, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What happens when you combine programmer&#8217;s from two of the world&#8217;s smartest companies? <em>Excel <\/em>is not smart enough to recognize a column of 5- or 9-digit values as ZIP codes, even if they appear right after a column of two-character state abbreviations. The leading zeros are trimmed off, turning Massachusetts ZIP codes into four-digit values, e.g., &#8220;02138&#8221; to &#8220;2138&#8221; (the ZIP code of the great minds of Harvard and Harvard Square, who will soon be tapped by President Warren to optimize our government).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What if we keep this as a Google-only process? The people who built Contacts apparently don&#8217;t talk to the people who built Sheets. There is no way to export directly from Contacts to a Google spreadsheet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Save to the local disk and then upload, right? The behavior is exactly the same as with <em>Excel<\/em>: leading zeroes of all of the five-digit ZIP codes are trimmed off. This is the company we&#8217;re going to trust with medical diagnoses? (&#8220;The doctor will Google you now&#8221; turning into &#8220;The Google will doctor you now.&#8221;)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As with most other challenges, if you&#8217;re a skilled user of <em>Excel <\/em>the solution is straightforward: create a blank workbook and then use the Data tab to import &#8220;From Text\/CSV&#8221;. Even on the full automatic setting, it correctly infers that the ZIP column is text, not number. But if the fully automated import works, why doesn&#8217;t it work simply to open the CSV file in <em>Excel<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(The whole process ended up taking way longer than if I&#8217;d simply addressed 180 envelopes by hand, of course.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The particular challenge of wrestling with Google Contacts or generating addressed envelopes is not that interesting, but I think it is a good starting point for a discussion of how machine learning and AI can ever be integrated back into the computer systems we use day to day. Google Translate does some impressive stuff, but why isn&#8217;t it easy to enhance Google Sheets?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Separately, the Google Contacts software has a long way to go to reach the same level of quality as what Sharp was shipping with the Wizard organizer in 1989. A contact with a single street address, once exported, will appear in a CSV-file row without any street address. Why is it difficult for Google to do what Apple, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, and Sharp were doing successfully in the 1990s?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Turning Google Contacts into address labels for Christmas\/New Year&#8217;s cards is a task that I expected to be simple. The plan was export to &#8220;Google CSV&#8221; format upload [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-nerdism"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>When does the great age of machine intelligence reach our desktop computers? - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/11\/when-does-the-great-age-of-machine-intelligence-reach-our-desktop-computers\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When does the great age of machine intelligence reach our desktop computers? - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Turning Google Contacts into address labels for Christmas\/New Year&#8217;s cards is a task that I expected to be simple. 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