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<\/p>\nAs I was leaving the grocery store yesterday, an elderly man stopped me at the self-serve lottery kiosk.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“Wait,” I said. The image was now larger, and I could read it.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
He nodded and made a thinking sound. “I saw something on television,” he said, “something about AE…”<\/p>\n
“AI, you mean?”<\/p>\n
“AI, yes. After two strokes, you don’t think too good.”<\/p>\n
“I’m so sorry.”<\/p>\n
“AI. There’s too much technology. Too much computer stuff. It’s not good.”<\/p>\n
“I think you’re right. Things used to be simpler.”<\/p>\n
“You used to talk to people. Now you talk to machines. Things are worse.”<\/p>\n
I nodded. “They are, indeed.”<\/p>\n
He thanked me. I wished him good luck on the tickets he bought. I hope the machine gave him some winners.<\/p>\n
He did not, by the way, buy the ticket he was asking about.<\/p>\n
For a while it seemed that neither the computer nor I were going to win this game of backgammon.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This one felt satisfying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 thatContinue reading “The Lottery Kiosk”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[5163,5326],"class_list":["post-34842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-backgammon","tag-pennsylvania-lottery","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34842\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}