Let’s put ‘soft skills’ training out of its misery. And dopey AI applications. And… hang on, I have a list.

I have been invited to attend a seminar that will teach me "how to be me".

This comes as a bit of a surprise as I had never realised that I was someone else. I wonder who? And how many other people have been invited to the seminar? Will they be learning how to be me as well? Surely if someone wants to teach a Zoomful of delegates on how to be a Dabbsy, it’s me who should be doing the training.

With a bit of luck, Daniel Craig will have been invited too; we’ll discover we had been each other for years and thus we can do a straight swap on the day. I have warned Mme D that by this time next week I should be six inches taller, a good deal slimmer and have ears better designed to hold the straps of my face mask in place.

Just possibly this is a sign that we have reached peak virtual soft training. It was bad enough that my LinkedIn feed has for years been stuffed with vacuous inspirational quotes ("Today is the first day of the rest of your week!" etc) posted by dolts with job titles such as Chief Happiness Officer. But when the global pandemic of managerial deadheadedness spills into promotions for seminars about recharging the inner basket of the bamboo soul and peeling back the cardboard fish scales of the interpersonal teaspoon, you are forced to wonder whether these are actually training courses or just an AI bot generating T-Rex lyrics.

I declare such virtual courses in Management Thinking For The Over-Promoted to be well and truly dead. Unlike the intensely missed Mark Feld, nobody will regret these bastards. Good. Now we can go back to training boring and unfashionable things such as practical skills.

[photo: The Ride A White Swan memorial bench, Golders Green Crematorium, London]

Since I’m on a (t)roll, I have some further examples of industrial fuckwittery ripe for putting out of their misery.

Artificial intelligence: there you go for a start.

Yes, yes, I appreciate that AI is a thing and it’s real, but most AI isn’t AI at all. Most of it is software that has been programmed to make calculations in the conventional way but with added showmanship to make the general public go woo.

Just imagine what PT Barnum could have done with a pocket calculator.

If you are still in any doubt, try this: a data scientist has now built an AI that can determine the optimal peanut butter and banana sandwich.

In other words, the scientist wrote some software that determines the optimal pattern for chopping up a banana and distributing the pieces on a slice of bread when you show it a photo of a banana and some bread. The program has not achieved self-awareness; it is not plotting to take over nuclear bases and wipe out humanity; nor is it even convincingly chatting away with someone in another room. Party-pooper I may be, but persuading computers to conduct multiple calculations using trigonometry and algebra is not artificial intelligence, it’s just programming.

AI is not dead. Let’s just wake up to the fact that it has yet to be born.

Next on my ‘everybody’s dead’ list? Bloody smart homes.

Fine, you’re going to lecture me on how amazing it is that you can switch on your home’s heating system from an app while you’re at work. Er, that’s not smart, that’s what is known as a remote control. Even my very first TV had one of those. Increasing the distance and eradicating the limitation of line-of-sight don’t make it smart.

It’s like those systems that allow you to change the colour of the lounge lighting to align with your emotional state. I mean, all that manfacturing and product distribution waste, all that electricity, all that development effort, just so you can like lounge around your pink and blue-tinted lair like some 1970s hairy-chested medallion man putting on your best Roger Moore impersonation to coo: "Say, do you like music? Let’s take the mood down a little. You have a beautiful name, Alexa…"

Gotta love those smart homes. Have fun next time you’re feeling queasy in the guts and have to enter three consecutive Captcha codes on your smartphone (that you left downstairs and have to waddle off to fetch and then creeping back upstairs in a kind of squat-hunch motion like Andy Serkis in a green leotard) before the toilet lid will open.

Beads of sweat will be trickling down your forehead as you struggle to determine what the bloody Hell pedestrian crossings look like in north America and whether the metal post counts as being part of a traffic light. And when you finally get the human waste unit operational, you discover that your rolling subscription to toilet paper has expired or, worse, been replaced by the digital-only edition.

Ah yes, once we declare all these useless things dead in the (toilet) water, industrial IT can concentrate on the stuff that matters… such as this app that can work out when you’re drunk by the way you walk. Yes, even if you’re a woman’s man, no time to talk.

So that accelerator had a use beyond spirit-level apps after all, eh? Build this into a smartwatch and it could report you to the local police station automatically, and even provide step-by-step GPS directions how to stagger there on your own.

I have a list of other nonsense that got worse during lockdown but I’m sure you have a list of your own to keep you busy. Let me know in the comments. At least take advantage of the current lull to kill off such crap before the second Covid wave hits. Me, I’m off to stockpile socks. You never know, my life might depend upon it.

ALISTAIR DABBS is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He is evidently merely jealous of those who invested in smart home technologies and left him behind in his quaintly archaic ways. Do not amuse him by responding favourably to his rantings and definitely do not share this weekly chronicle with any of your friends or colleagues. He does, however, have the warmest toes in IT journalism.