The artificial intelligence summary of the Yahoo email seemed innocent enough. Yahoo had taken on the task of pre-reading my email and providing a summary.
How thoughtful.
If you have a Yahoo mail account, Yahoo is sensitive to the demands on your time and attention, too.
The summary said:
“Your $59,000 outgoing transfer from Self-Directed IRA to TOTAL CHECKING account was successfully processed…”
To be sure, the message was to the point. Also, I had transferred $59,000 to a checking account. The roof replacement work from the monster central Texas hail-storm last spring had been completed. It was time to pay out the insurance proceeds.
But the money wasn’t in a self-directed IRA account. If it was, it would be making the Burns family tax bill a lot bigger.
Fortunately, it was “just” an AI error.
But it wasn’t the last.
A few days later another Yahoo summary blotted out the time for an important Microsoft Teams meeting. Only dumb luck got me to my computer in time for the meeting.
Exactly how Yahoo AI created these miseries will remain a mystery. I’ve gone into Yahoo settings and disabled it. At least I hope I have. You never know.
Now, and in the future, I will be reading my email all by my pitiful, un-aided self.
Unfortunately for all of us, the proverbial handwriting is on the wall. It’s coming to a digital display near you, if it isn’t already there. Whether you want it or not.
So, here’s a radical thought: If we get so much email that we would benefit from having someone summarize it for us, maybe we should find a way to get less email.
That notion, it turns out, was really a riff on something a computer consultant had suggested only a few weeks earlier. As he was helping me bring my new iMac to life and transferring everything from the laptop it replaced, he had suggested:
“It would be useful for you to go through your emails and delete all that are useless, unnecessary and unwanted.”
A few moments later he added, “I did it. It took a full day. But it was worth it.”
Stephen Alison, operating as MacSolv in Austin, specializes in everything Apple. I’m lucky to have found him since his usual gigs are whole systems for non-profit companies that are Apple-based.
Like millions of people, I start each day scrolling and deleting. That’s why I was surprised to find 25,000 emails had been transferred to my new machine. Working in sprints over four days, I unsubscribed from senders and deleted 19,000 unsolicited emails. Another 1,000 would go if I could endure the tedium.
Think about it. Somehow, in using my phone and computer, I had gone from being a person who used the Internet to seek information to a person deluged by unsolicited marketing offers – at a ratio of at least five to one. Worse, every one of those emails could crack the door to the multitudes of criminals who would rather steal than sell or serve.
We open the door ourselves:
—Many vendors offer a 10 or 20 percent discount on our first order just for leaving our email address. Enter and Gotcha!
—The same vendor may sell your email address.
Once the vendor, publication, organization or political entity has your email address, they discover, every day, things we should buy, publications we should subscribe to, trips we should take or candidates we should support.
There was a time when having a computer and the Internet was a magnificent thing. Computers were a great tool for composing and calculating. The Internet was a quick and wonderful source of information.
But that was years ago.
Today, between artificial intelligence that is dumb, constant updates of apps that take over the tool we thought was ours, the inevitable loss of privacy and the constant threat from bad actors who steal money and identities, I’ve begun to think fondly of carrier pigeons and quill pens.
It’s time to crank down the firehose.
Related columns:
Scott Burns, “Discovering Abundance,” 8/24/2024: https://scottburns.com/discovering-abundance/
Sources and References:
Google search: “problems with Yahoo AI summaries:” https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=problems+with+Yahoo+AI+email+summaries&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
This information is distributed for education purposes, and it is not to be construed as an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or endorsement of any particular security, product, or service.
Photo: Scott Burns, Taking a long view on the walk to Santiago, 2024
(c) Scott Burns, 2025