As I was leaving the grocery store yesterday, an elderly man stopped me at the self-serve lottery kiosk.
He was buying scratch-off tickets — he was organized, he had a plastic envelope — and there was one, something like Monster Mash, that he didn’t understand. There was something about the logo on the touchscreen that didn’t make sense.
I haven’t bought a scratch-off lottery ticket in thirty years and know nothing about what Pennsylvania offers, but I wondered if I could solve this for him, give him an answer. I leaned in to look, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. There was some writing, and some sort of symbol, but it was indeed too small.
His hand accidentally brushed the screen and brought up the screen where he could buy it. “I didn’t mean to do that,” he said, and he went to cancel it.
“Wait,” I said. The image was now larger, and I could read it.
“Okay, I think I get it. There’s some sort of QR code functionality to this scratch-off.” I judged him to be about seventy, and I realized I might need to explain further. “There’s going to be a symbol on the ticket. You’d take your phone” — I mimed holding the ticket in my left hand and pointing my phone at it with my right — “and then your phone will take you to a website where there’s an online game or something like that.”
He nodded and made a thinking sound. “I saw something on television,” he said, “something about AE…”
“AI, you mean?”
“AI, yes. After two strokes, you don’t think too good.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“AI. There’s too much technology. Too much computer stuff. It’s not good.”
“I think you’re right. Things used to be simpler.”
“You used to talk to people. Now you talk to machines. Things are worse.”
I nodded. “They are, indeed.”
He thanked me. I wished him good luck on the tickets he bought. I hope the machine gave him some winners.
He did not, by the way, buy the ticket he was asking about.
For a while it seemed that neither the computer nor I were going to win this game of backgammon.
It was one of those slugging matches where I knock one of white’s pieces off the board, and white knocks two of mine off the board, but somehow I was able to stack my pieces in a way that white was unable to bring its piece back onto the board for several turns.
This one felt satisfying.