This is Technology Bytes, episode 138 for October 26, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast, where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
On today’s microcast, I’m going to be talking about artificial intelligence.
And I’ve talked about it before in the past, and it seems to be on the forefront of many people’s minds, I guess.
It seems to be used all the time.
We look at active users of ChatGPT or Claude or whatever Anthropic offers.
I don’t know all of them at this point.
But it’s really funny because I’m like a tech nerd.
People will say that about me.
That’s one of the ways that I get described.
And yet, I never use artificial intelligence.
And when I say never use, I think I mean I never use on purpose.
I mean, there are times when I search, and it looks like artificial intelligence gives me the answer because that’s what Google does these days.
And generally, I’m using Google as my search engine, but I don’t specifically look to artificial intelligence to provide me with answers.
And the other day, I was using, I don’t know, searching for something about, I think it was my wife’s vehicle.
And it says, do this on this vehicle.
And it just doesn’t work.
It’s just not available.
Those menu functions just do not exist.
And it’s something that I’ve often heard about artificial intelligence is that their answers are absolutely confident even when they’re completely wrong.
And so that’s what can get some people in trouble because they just take it for its answer.
And sometimes it’s hard to know if it’s right or wrong.
In this case, it was very easy for me.
I was sitting in the seat of my wife’s car and going through the menus that it told me to go through, and it just wasn’t correct.
It wasn’t there.
There was no way to do what I wanted to accomplish with the information I was getting from artificial intelligence.
So why don’t I think it’s useful?
And so many pundits and the people that I listen to on tech podcasts, and even in my own family, my son uses it on a semi-regular basis, but he uses it for coding.
And I think it’s very specific for that, and I’ve heard it’s very good for that.
You know, I don’t do that.
My daughter uses it for simple answers to questions that she doesn’t want to search for.
I find that search is just as good for me.
In fact, I almost often scroll past the artificial intelligence answers and find a website that I trust and feel like will give me good information.
And yet it’s all around me.
My coworkers use it all the time.
And my boss is always saying, hey, when we get all this data, we can just feed it into chat GPT and let it tell us how we should run this or that or the other.
And I don’t know.
I just don’t have that same confidence in these technologies that others do, and it’s kind of weird because of where my background is.
And other things, you know, it’s like the other day a coworker sent me a spreadsheet, and I said, oh, that’s cool the way that you did this formula or whatever.
And he goes, oh, it was chat GPT.
I just had them tell me how to write the formula.
And while I understand that, that’s cool.
There are spreadsheets that I have made.
I’m very good at Excel.
I’ve used it for a lot of things.
But there are times when I’m not sure exactly how to do what I want to do.
And I just do a search, and it says, here, plug this in.
So I don’t know.
Maybe it’s artificial intelligence.
Not really.
It really comes from people, humans who know how to use Excel better than I do, and they have posted something on the Internet.
I find that just as fast, just as useful.
And I’m also not concerned that it’s not going to work.
So it’s weird, again, that I guess I just don’t trust it.
I don’t feel it offers me all that much.
You know, a lot of people use it for writing, and I’m like, you know, whatever.
I’m not writing for a living.
I can get my point across.
I’m intelligent enough to do that.
I don’t need chat GPT to write anything for me at this point.
And it’s really quite useless to me.
And it’s funny because people say, you know, you just need to start using it, and then you’ll see how useful it can become.
And I’m like, yeah, I don’t know.
I don’t get it.
And even in Apple’s world, which is where I live, you know, the visual intelligence, take a picture of something, know what it is, be able to order it online.
I don’t know.
I just don’t know why those things just don’t come second nature.
It feels like an extra step when I can get the same information just by looking it up.
And search is still pretty good, as many people complain about what Google’s doing these days.
And I complain too because I think they’ve ruined their search with artificial intelligence being the top of the list.
It just isn’t all that helpful to me, and oftentimes it’s wrong.
So then I thought, well, maybe I have a privacy problem.
I don’t like Google anyway.
I don’t like any tech company.
I like Apple.
I think they keep my stuff private.
But I think everybody else is after me for my data.
They’re after me to sell me something.
And it just makes me uncomfortable.
And so I was thinking, is it a privacy concern?
And some of it is.
I don’t need artificial intelligence to have any more information from me than they already have just for me living my life.
I don’t need to feed into them who I am, what I am, how I am.
I need them to leave me alone and just to provide information without taking anything back from me.
But that’s not the way the world works.
If you get things for free, you’re the product.
That’s just the way it happens.
And I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts and talking about the home assistance.
And they’re like, you know, Apple doesn’t have anything that’s very good, but at least they don’t sell you something every other minute.
And, you know, people putting ads in products that you purchased on just to show family pictures or whatever.
It’s just that, I don’t know, that bothers me.
I’m not a marketing person.
I don’t like advertisements.
I think that they’re often sleazy.
I spent time in car sales and disliked every minute of it because of the way people were treated.
And what would be done just to earn some money.
And it just drove me absolutely crazy.
I’m a tech guy.
I like to be in the mix of production because I’m also a manufacturing guy.
All of this is a little bit beyond me in its daily use.
I don’t ask any help from artificial intelligence in getting my work done.
And I don’t know that I want it.
And so then it scares me a little bit.
Because not using it, does that put me at a disadvantage?
Does that leave me unable to keep up with the world as it moves forward?
Am I going to lose position in my job because somebody else is going to come along that understands how to use artificial intelligence?
Am I going to get passed up?
I’m 61 years old.
Maybe that has something to do with it.
But I’ve always liked the latest technology.
I’ve always liked what’s coming next.
But I’ve liked it in the form of software and hardware.
Well, that’s what artificial intelligence is.
But I’ve also liked it because it’s useful to me on a daily basis.
And I am not there with artificial intelligence at this point.
Maybe I need to get there.
Because maybe something that is there that I need to be using, I need to become more comfortable with, so that I can make sure I maintain my space and my work environment.
Because I like what I do.
I like where I am.
At the moment, I don’t feel artificial intelligence coming for me from any point of view at my work at all.
So we’ll see what happens.
But I just thought I’d share my thoughts on it today and let you know from a tech nerd’s position why I don’t use artificial intelligence.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast.
And I look forward to the next time we are together, taking another bite of technology.
