Welcome to the age of artificial stupidity (AS)...

 Warner Brothers movie poster
from a 2001 movie directed
by Steven Spielberg (Wikipedia)

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/9-6-25

I’m so glad artificial intelligence has arrived on the scene. It explains a lot about my own life.

I realize now that whatever intelligence might be ascribed to me has been artificial all along. Plus, for everything there is an opposite, right? So, if there is artificial intelligence (often referred to as AI) there has to be artificial stupidity (AS). You know, like black-white, hot-cold, sick-well, etc.

What a relief that is. Whenever you feel stupid — and who doesn’t sometimes? — or do something stupid (politicians included), now you can say it’s just artificial stupidity and get on with your stupid life.

Many years ago, I wrote a column about hockey, titled “The Game of Hockey Is a Lot Like Life — Stupid.” This was back when I was a hockey dad, probably he dumbest — make that stupidest — hockey dad in the bleachers watching the games. In short, I’d never taken an interest in hockey so I knew nothing about the rules of the game when I was thrust into the vortex of youth hockey in Northern Minnesota.

Here are some excerpts from that hockey column, every paragraph of which ends with the word stupid. It starts out:

“Heaven knows I try to keep up with what’s going on when I watch hockey, but it’s a fast game, and most of the time I don’t know why the referee or linesman or other guy in a striped shirt blows the whistle, so I ask somebody and when they tell me I feel stupid.”

A couple of paragraphs later it goes on:

“It’s easy for guys who have been patrons of the game of hockey to recognize infractions of the rules, but how’s somebody like me who doesn’t know cross checking from butt ending supposed to know when they’re doing it? Then, if I ask somebody, I feel stupid.”

Here’s another quote from this old column to help me make my point:

“There are certain things I understand about hockey, but then everybody understands them because how could you miss them? Like ‘charging.’ Your kid (your kid is why you see all this hockey in the first place) goes on the road for a weekend series and you have to stay in a hotel for two nights, eating at restaurants, and you pull out your Master Card and put the weekend on it, that’s called charging, and when I do it, I feel stupid.”

I wrote most of that more than 30 years ago and I’ve been feeling stupid ever since. But hold it! We now realize it must have been artificial stupidity, the opposite of artificial intelligence.

Here’s the final paragraph from that old missive:

“Sometimes I watch the frustration the hockey players experience in chasing that little black puck around a slippery surface while being knocked around by other people just for trying to achieve a goal. I think of hockey as a metaphor for life, because the same things happen to you when you try to accomplish anything — there’s always somebody in your way to knock you off balance and stop you from reaching your goal — and when my mind wanders down those philosophical pathways I miss something on the ice like ‘hooking’ or ‘slashing’ and I ask somebody what happened and when they tell me I feel stupid.

Unfortunately, hockey isn’t the only area of life where situations can make you feel…well, you know. Like if I’m at Menards or Home Depot in my yuppie khakis and polo shirt perusing the shelves and I recognize nothing on display; what the stuff is for in the home, and even the tools to install it. Then I look down the aisle and there’s this corpulent guy in bib overalls and camo cap who is intelligently filling a shopping cart with stuff that I don’t even recognize that he’ll need for some home project. I realize that the only things I do recognize in the whole place are cooking grills and toilet paper, and I feel stupid.

And don’t get me started on bird baths. We have had birth baths at our homes over the years, including today where one is located along a sidewalk leading to the street. I walk by it every day and I have never seen a bird taking a bath in it. And in past yards where we’ve put out bird baths, I never saw any birds bathing either, and I wonder why we put out good hard-earned money for bird baths that never get used, or even care about birds’ bathing habits, and I feel stupid.

Finally (and it’s about time), how about this? I’m sent to the grocery store and told to get sweet potatoes and when I get home, I’m told I got yams. I realize I don’t know the difference between sweet potatoes and yams and, yup, I feel stupid.

Oh, and what about TV remotes? They are intentionally designed to make the user feel stupid. (One of the buttons on ours I fear would send the Strategic Air Command on a nuclear attack on Moscow.)

But I am relieved to know now that all this is only artificial stupidity. I hope my intelligence ain’t. (Oops, better brush up on your usage, pal.  Ain’t ain’t no real word…stupid.) 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.

My life: Plenty of war and little peace...

Gen. Douglas MacArthur & troops landing in the Philippines
(National Archives)

Written by Jim Heffernan/DuluthNewsTribune/8-2-25  

I might as well own up to my advanced age. I was born in 1939. For those who count on their fingers (I sometimes do) you’d need eight persons counting all of their fingers and one with a hand tied behind her back. That’d be 85.

 

Never thought it would happen to me. Or Ringo Starr, who just caught up to me. If you don’t know who Ringo Starr is, you’re either older than I (and that ain’t easy, friend) or way younger.

 

A few contemporaries of mine were chatting over a restaurant breakfast recently. Age came up. And let me put some of those 85 fingers into perspective. You are reading writings of a person whose parents — both mother and father — were born BEFORE MOTORIZED FLIGHT. Yup, before the Wright Brothers managed to get their original craft into the air at Kitty Hawk in 1903. And there weren’t many cars around then either.

 

Going back even further, my oldest grandparent, and the only one who ever laid eyes on me, was born in 1855 (I can prove it on his tombstone). So if you pay attention to history, there were a lot of people still around then whose lives overlapped with that of George Washington, who died in 1799.

 

That grandfather was 10 years old when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 at the end of the Civil War.  It was said he claimed he could see the glow of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 from his home in southern Ontario. I never got to ask him about that or anything else: he died when I was two years old, a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, marking entry of the United States in to World War II.

 

There’s been a lot of war in my lifetime. My birth in October 1939 came a month after German Chancellor Adolf Hitler actually started WW II by invading and massacring Poland a month earlier.

 

Welcome to the world, young James (called at the time, Jimmy).

 

I actually remember some things about World War II as I grew into in my formative years — the first five years of my life. I remember a lot of talk about war and neighbor young men who had gone off to fight it. A couple of them who were members of our church were killed overseas. I remember the collective grief over that.

 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt
signing the Declaration of War against Japan
(National Archives)

Perhaps the most significant things in that era that I remember are the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945 and the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, bringing the war to an end. I recall how happy everyone was that the war was over, as I was anticipating entering first grade, having successfully completed kindergarten. (I excelled at the daily nap.)

 

That “great” war was only the beginning of a succession of wars in the ensuing years as I was growing up. Five years after WW II came to an end, along came the Korean War. Wow, another war. I was 10 and still in elementary school. Exciting to a 10-year-old with sketchy memories of the earlier war. Not so exciting to the “kids” just a few years older in their later teens who were drafted into the military and sent over to fight it, many of whom never came back.

 

But hey, it only lasted three years. Surely that would be it with war. Yeah, right. Of course, there was fighting here and there in those intervening years until my own generation that, if called upon, could be drafted to fight. Every boy of my generation was required to register for the draft at age 18 and face induction into the army when your name came up. It was called your “military obligation.”

 

So I registered and managed to avoid being drafted until my early 20s with a college student deferment, but they finally caught up with me and down I went to Minneapolis for an army physical exam. I passed, in spite of being stone deaf in one ear since childhood. I should have had bone spurs.

 

Facing the draft, I joined the Minnesota Army National Guard where you could serve six months of active duty and six years as a weekend warrior back in your home state. I became a general…screw up.

 

While on active duty I recall sitting on bleachers with other inductees during boot camp and having a gruff sergeant lecture us for not trying hard enough in our training to become good soldiers. I’ll try to quote him. “You guys better start paying attention, ‘cause there’s a little country called Vietnam where things are heating up.” 

 

Vietnam? Where’s that? It was 1963. 

Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washinton D.C.
(Wikipedia)

 

When that one heated up and kept going for 10 more years, more than 55,000 Americans had given up their lives when it finally came to an end. I’ve stood at that long, black wall in Washington, D.C., with all their names carved in stone. Try that sometime; it’s hard to retain composure. Very hard.

 

Oops, I’m running out of space here, but not wars. Can’t recount every war in my lifetime but here we are in 2025 with war once again all around us — Russia vs. Ukraine, Israel vs. Hamas. Lots of people are dying still. Iran or Russia vs. United States? Always a question mark.

 

You hear quite a bit of talk these days about possible World War III. If it happens, I’ll probably miss it, but my grandchildren won’t. Concerns me deeply.

 

Happy summer. Enjoy. Better hurry, there’s not too much left.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.