If you’re anything like me – and by that, I mean a ham-fisted, technological nincompoop – then you probably have regular skirmishes, grapples and tussles with a variety of household contraptions and appliances that are supposed to make everyday life easier but simply shine a light on your own doddering incompetence.
The other day, for instance, I spent a laughably ridiculous amount of time trying to remount the glass plate in my microwave after it had wobbled off the little three-pronged thingamabob that it balances on.
C’mon now, I’m sure you’ve endured a similarly preposterous palaver? Or is it just me who’s the idiot?
For such a humdrum, seemingly routine task, it took me yonks to get the turntable back onto the coupler as I tilted, tipped and shoogled said plate like a fumbling auld colonel trying to put a record on a gramophone amid a torrent of muttering expletives.
In an age of rampant advancements in all sorts of gizmos and gadgets, my microwave muddle was another stark reminder of my slide towards crotchety irrelevance.
I suppose it doesn’t matter, though. By all shrieking, hysterical accounts, Artificial Intelligence, or AI as we know it, is going to wipe out mankind within 10 years unless the boffins throttle it back on a restraining leash.
What was it the American comedian, Jerry Seinfeld, said again? “We're smart enough to invent AI, dumb enough to need it, and so stupid we can't figure out if we did the right thing.”
That sums it up nicely, doesn’t it?
In golf, this terrifying future is already here. At the New Mexico Open the other week, the world was introduced to Duff Foreman, an AI-generated TV analyst who popped up alongside the human commentators to pass on his pearls of wisdom.
Duff, who looked a bit like Captain Scarlett and had an odd Scottish accent, crunched numbers and scanned databases at a furious rate while spouting out all sorts of statistics, course info and various percentages about the chances of players doing this, that and the other.
I have a weird feeling that the bold Duff will be the last, cackling voice I hear when the AI apocalypse eventually comes as he informs me that I have a zero percent chance of surviving it.
Knowing me, I’ll be too busy farting around with the glass plate in the ruddy microwave to even notice this extinction-level event.
Give it a few weeks, and the brainiacs will probably come up with the ultimate AI voice of golf called something like Peter AI-liss.
Mind you, in this touchy, you-can’t-say-that world of ours, imagine a digital version rehashing some of dear Peter’s hoary unorthodoxy?
“I haven’t seen a grip like that since they closed the gents at King’s Cross Station.” The AI would be unplugged at the wall.
The late, great Peter was never one for statistics. These days, of course, the game is obsessed by them.
I was watching the BMW PGA Championship on Friday, and, thanks to the live broadcast’s official AI partner, we were all reliably informed that Jon Rahm’s chances of making the halfway cut had moved from eight per cent to 0.8 per cent. Rahm was nine-over-par at the time of this revelation.
It was a needlessly intelligent way of saying he had no bloody chance. I didn’t actually see what chance AI gave Manuel Elvira of winning his first tour title when he stood on the West Course’s 18th tee in a tie for the lead.
Golf, of course, has never been an exact science. Tension, nerves and the enormity of the occasion tend to fling percentages out of the window.
Lapses, and occasional collapses, are woven into the fabric of this fickle, unpredictable game and Elvira’s painful double-bogey finish was another illustration of that. We’re all human. Well, unless you’re Duff Foreman.
Anyway, enough of this Artificial Intelligence lark. Let’s move on to some uplifting, genuine achievement.
Late on Sunday night UK time, cheery news came through from across the Atlantic that Nairn golfer Sandy Scott had secured promotion to the main PGA Tour after a dramatic maiden win on the second-tier Korn Ferry Tour in the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Championship in Ohio.
It was a tremendous effort from the 28-year-old and one which underlined the patience and perseverance, among other things, that this pursuit of hard knocks demands.
Not that long ago, Scott was wondering if he’d ever play seriously again after a niggling wrist injury pushed him onto the sidelines.
A Walker Cup player in 2019, he was forced to withdraw from the 2021 GB&I team due to his affliction.
It took a couple of surgeries to get it sorted and when he turned pro in 2022, Scott served an eye-opening, intrepid apprenticeship on the PGA Tour Americas, which bounced around Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.
It was a hugely valuable experience. “I felt if I could compete there, then I could play anywhere in the world,” Scott told me a couple of years ago.
“It taught me a lot about how to handle life as a pro.”
Not every aspiring golfer can handle that life; one that can be a giddy, mind-mangling cocktail of hope, adventure, fear, pressure, success and failure.
Scott has put in the hard yards, earned his stripes and is now set to rub shoulders with the world’s best.
As for your correspondent? Well, it’s back to fiddling with that bloomin’ microwave.
