This is why we need data centers, apparently:

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

Imagine that. Imagine being a big Silicon Valley macher looking to promote your new “AI assistant,” and coming up with that story to tell the New York Times. With no shame whatsoever. It is so difficult for you to think not of three well-developed paragraphs about your daughter, but bullet points, and find it so overwhelming that you delegate it to your pet clanker, who comes up with three descriptors so bland and anodyne that they could have come out of a committee in one of Google’s boardrooms.

Poor little Marielle. I’m sure she wants for nothing other than a mother, one who doesn’t see her as ol’ what’s-her-name, occasionally glimpsed passing through the rooms of her lavish San Francisco home.

I saw one reaction to this last night, that of a normal person, who said that if he had done that, he’d have taken the secret to his grave.

The rest of the story is equally horrifying, touting Dazzle as “an AI wife,” i.e. “an emotional labor bot that can plan a birthday party and knows when it’s Crazy Socks Day or Crazy Hat Day at the kids’ school, because it has photos of the fliers that came home crumpled in a backpack.”

I have a better idea. Let’s not have Crazy Socks Day. Or Crazy Hat Day. Or let the kids, or the husband, keep track of these vital observances.

And these freaks are the ones leading us into the future, demanding our natural resources, breaking our power grid, promising a cure for cancer. Maybe, one of these days. In the meantime, they’ll tell the world’s worst mother about her daughter.

P.S. What 10-year-old isn’t an animal lover, by the way? Given that this AI assistant has access to all your photos, etc., it may be basing this conclusion on a few pix of Marielle with a puppy.

Feh. Enough. We’re less than a week away from you-know-what, and one day past elections in Israel. Both events will/have reveal(ed)…something. I’ll leave that to the experts. But if you’re daring to think past Tuesday, I found this dispassionate take on what, exactly, the anticipated blue wave can actually accomplish once they dry off and get sworn in, pretty informative. You campaign in poetry, govern in prose, the old saying goes. Here’s the prose: We lose Alito, but likely pick up a similarly unhinged 40-year-old conservative. Impeachment yes, maybe multiple impeachments yes, removal no. And so on. Definitely worth a read.

As many of you know, all comments here are moderated, but once you pass the gate, you’re in for good. A typo in your screen name or email will send you back to moderation. Today was a new one: An AI-written spam comment in the moderation bin, which referenced elements in the previous post, struck just the right tone, and…plugged an AI product. The clankers are coming for all of us.

Happy Wednesday.