Unfinished Wisdom

I would like to report that I have been thoroughly outmatched by an 18-month-old.

This is irritating because I have spent most of my life becoming competent. My first computer was an Apple II. Not an emulator. Not a vintage collector’s item sitting on a shelf somewhere. An actual Apple II with giant floppy disks and two disk drives. One drive held the software. The other held your work. There was no cloud, no automatic backup, and no helpful warning asking if you wanted to save before disaster struck. If you forgot to save something, the computer simply allowed you to experience consequences. I learned punch-card computing in high school because almost nobody else knew how. I built websites, taught online learning when most colleges were still debating whether online learning was real, and have spent decades helping people navigate technology.

In other words, I am not usually intimidated by a remote control.

For years, our television required three separate remotes. One for the television, one for the Apple TV, and one for the sound bar. Nobody liked this arrangement, but eventually we accepted it the way adults accept many things. The bathroom fan makes a weird noise. The dishwasher has a personality disorder. The printer occasionally communes with dark forces. Life goes on.

Then one day my granddaughter got hold of the Apple TV remote.

At eighteen months old, she approaches the world with the confidence of someone who has never once questioned whether she is qualified for a task. She presses buttons. She opens drawers. She investigates every object she encounters. She is part scientist, part explorer, and part raccoon.

At some point during one of her visits she acquired the remote and began pressing buttons with great enthusiasm. A few minutes later she wandered off to pursue more important business, probably involving rocks, crackers, or the dog. Shortly afterward, we discovered that one remote now controlled everything. The television turned on, the sound worked, and the Apple TV behaved itself. For three glorious months, our entertainment system functioned exactly the way it should have all along.

Naturally, neither my husband nor I paid the slightest attention to how this miracle had occurred.

Then this week it stopped working.

My husband and I did what capable adults do when something breaks. We began troubleshooting. At first we checked the obvious things. Then we checked the less obvious things. Then we started discussing infrared signals, optical cables, software settings, and something called HDMI-CEC, which sounds less like a television protocol and more like a government agency responsible for regulating grain storage.

The longer the problem persisted, the more determined we became. If you have ever been married, you understand this phase of the process. The original problem quietly exits the room and is replaced by a completely different problem. The new problem is that two intelligent adults have been challenged by an appliance.

Now it is personal.

Before long, I was consulting artificial intelligence. More than one artificial intelligence, in fact. I would like to pause here and acknowledge the absurdity of a woman who learned computing on punch-card systems seeking advice from multiple AI platforms because a remote control had become uncooperative. Had you explained this future to my seventeen-year-old self, she would have assumed civilization had taken a very strange turn.

The advice became increasingly sophisticated. We unplugged devices. We reset settings. We explored theories involving software updates, communication protocols, and mysterious technological handshakes. At one point I realized we were investing more intellectual energy into a television remote than we had devoted to some genuinely important life decisions.

Meanwhile, my husband was becoming progressively more elevated. He would disappear into the living room, emerge with a new theory, reject the previous theory, and return to the living room for further investigation. I recognized the symptoms because I was suffering from the same condition. Between us, we have solved a great many problems over the years. We have navigated careers, illnesses, family crises, financial decisions, home repairs, and all the unexpected plot twists that come with building a life together. Surely we could defeat a remote control.

Eventually, one of the AI systems suggested pressing two buttons on the Apple TV remote at the same time.

That was the solution.

Two buttons.

The television immediately sprang to life. Everything worked.

My husband and I stared at each other for a moment before laughing at ourselves. Not because the situation was frustrating, although it certainly was. We laughed because we could see exactly what had happened. We had built increasingly complicated explanations for a problem that turned out to have a remarkably simple solution.

The metaphor is not lost on me.

The older I get, the more I notice how often experience helps and hinders in equal measure. Expertise teaches us where to look for answers, but it also teaches us where we expect those answers to be. We assume solutions are hidden in menus because that’s where we’ve found them before. We assume difficult problems require sophisticated explanations because often they do. We assume that if we just gather a little more information, perform a little more analysis, and think a little harder, the answer will eventually reveal itself.

Most of the time, that strategy serves us well.

Every once in a while, however, life hands the solution to a toddler.

I am not suggesting that toddlers possess secret wisdom. Most days they possess sticky fingers, half-chewed crackers, and an alarming willingness to test gravity. What they lack, however, are our assumptions. They don’t know where the answer is supposed to be. They don’t know which explanations are respectable and which are ridiculous. They simply press buttons and see what happens.

Lately I have begun to wonder how many of life’s more complicated challenges resemble that remote. How often am I assuming a problem must be difficult because it feels important? How often am I overlooking the obvious because I am busy searching for the sophisticated? How often am I carrying around so much expertise that I fail to notice what is sitting right in front of me?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that somewhere out there is an 18-month-old who accidentally fixed a technology problem that stumped two adults, several decades of accumulated experience, and multiple artificial intelligence systems. She has no idea she did it. She has probably already moved on to a rock, a cracker, or something she found under the couch.

And if I’m being honest, that’s probably for the best.