A time with no maybe

People hedge when they speak, and it helps. "I think", "probably", "I might be wrong about this". The hedge makes room for the listener to weigh what is being said.

Screens do not hedge. A woman in Dubai orders a birthday present and the page tells her, in bold, that it will arrive tomorrow by four. Not "probably". Not "if the warehouse is not behind". A time, to the hour, with a small green tick beside it. She plans the afternoon around it and tells her nephew to expect it.

The time is a guess dressed as a fact. Behind it are a van, a driver, a jam on Al Khail Road and a building whose gate code nobody wrote down. But it arrives in the same voice as a calculator, and calculators are never wrong, so it gets believed.

The same voice comes from the star rating, the top search result, the figure on a sales report, and now the new software that writes whole paragraphs with perfect composure. All of it is useful. A good deal of it is right. None of it says how unsure it is.

It would help if every screen opened with an honest disclaimer. They will not, and waiting for them puts the problem in the wrong place.

The certainty belongs to the machine. Believing it is our part. The hedge the screen leaves out is one I can add myself, every time, before a tidy answer decides anything for me.