Hang on restarting; hang on, restarting
The intelligence that's coming may be more artificial than we'd like
A quarter of a century ago, Microsoft’s Windows 98 introduced a new feature: hanging on restart. This past summer, I finally switched to all Macs except for a utility machine because of one main problem: the brand new powerful PC I bought kept hanging on restart.
This is the truly scary thing about the surge in artificial intelligence applications in the past couple of years. The frightening thing that should be apparent to everyone is that the people who make the most widely used operating system don’t know how it works.
Think about that one bedeviling glitch. It hangs. Search for the problem on Microsoft’s site and find a 220-word answer. The Gettysburg Address, for reference, is 272 words and doesn’t tell you what might work or what to try next. I concede that “new birth of freedom” might have been Lincoln’s way of saying “reboot.” It’s a guess, but no more so than Microsoft’s understanding of the most common problem in its most dominant product.
Product is the key word here. When a car becomes a product, you get tail fins. When clothing becomes product, you get shoulder pads. With an operating system, you get Cortana.
There is an old joke about Microsoft planting fruit trees that produce five-year-old apples. But Macs are only better, not blameless. Ask a Mac guru what a kernel panic is, and they will tell you what it does. Ask them what causes it, and they will tell you to restart, possibly with one or more keys held down.
Microsoft does not tell you on its website what causes a computer to hang. The implication in that and in its guesswork solutions is that there is more than one possible cause. It would be interesting to see a list of things Microsoft thought might cause a hang in Windows 98 and the same list for Windows 11. Maybe there’s a list in a Microsoft office, hanging on a wall, so to speak. But what the company knows and what it does about restart hangs is as great a mystery as the disappearance of the Mary Celeste crew.
As great a mystery is what defines a hang. Like Cary Grant at the top of the Empire State Building, the user must ask how long it is sensible to wait. Your computer may be performing a legitimate function that will end after some time, but that time is not defined in minutes or seconds. Time that might be spent wondering what is beauty, what is truth, what is a soul, is instead spent wondering whether to hold down the power button for eight seconds.
The hang is not the only problem. The PC I returned last summer also encrypted two drives without asking and corrupted one of them. But the hang is the best example because of the enduring mystery it presents.
And so long as Microsoft does not know how Windows works, we should be very afraid. At a doctor’s visit this week, I saw the phrase “What AI can do for your practice” in an apparent ad on a computer screen. During a particularly uncomfortable part of the visit, I found myself thinking about how AI running on Microsoft could pick this time to disengage and go off on whatever Zen adventure it enjoys while humanity waits.
I programmed a target-shooting game on a Timex Sinclair 1000 four decades ago. A seasoned programmer offering to give me tips on it took about a minute to say never mind. I know something about software, and I have some skills. Three and a half decades ago, I disassembled and repaired a drive controller unit on deadline at the Petersburg newspaper. I’d first seen the unit a week before, but the publisher standing in the doorway staring at his wristwatch was a scene I’d first seen in “The Fountainhead,” which I’d read at age 14 like I was supposed to. I know something about hardware, and I have some skills.
I wonder what the average user does when faced with a problem Microsoft can’t solve and a 220-word solution involving safe starts and command prompts. But maybe the hang on restart is something that only happens to someone with a little more than journeyman skills in hardware and software, and maybe I’ve been causing it myself since Clinton’s second term. I doubt it. Just as I doubt the capabilities of artificial intelligence created on the machines that gave us the restart hang and the kernel panic. It’s frightening to think about all the things that can already be done with AI, and to think that we don’t really know how they work. It’s more frightening that the people building these systems may not know either.