With the constant below-freezing temperatures and the parade of weekly storms, this is beginning to feel like the winters of my childhood. Of course, now there is a lot less snow each time and it melts pretty quickly after every storm. When we were kids, the snow got plowed up into furrows several feet high alongside the town roads. Downtown it got scooped up by a big loader and hauled down to the parking lot at the foot of Main Street.

In those days, it would get dumped overboard if it didn’t melt fast enough to make room for the next snowstorm. I recall kids and dogs climbing up onto the mountains of dirty snow piled high between the finger piers. Nowadays the road snow gets hauled inland to protect the harbor water from contaminants.

A couple of years ago, I would hear the term AI, Artificial Intelligence, only once in a great while. It was certainly not on the regular evening news. It was occasionally mentioned on public radio during some in-depth report about high tech stuff happening in some valley far away from the Vineyard.

I remember thinking that I knew what AI was when we got one of those robot vacuum cleaners that roams around the house bumping into furniture. It would often get stuck on a doorway threshold or wedged under the couch where there wasn’t enough headroom. Apparently, you could press and hold down the buttons on its topside to encourage it to learn the floor plan of the house and where the hazards where located. That would help it do its job without getting into trouble. That makes sense that it would be more intelligent if it got smarter on its own.

Now, AI is mentioned at some point during every news program. It seems to be alternately the biggest threat to humanity or the best prospect for our survival as a species. Best that I can figure out, along with photoshop making all pictures now suspect of tampering, AI has made the written word untrustworthy — all part of the progress of technology and evolution.

The United States Coast Guard has been using the term AI for many years. You sometimes run into it when renewing your license to operate commercial vessels. When you haven’t given them all of the details that they require they will send you an email labeled AI. In one of the oldest departments of our federal government, the term AI means “Awaiting Information.” That, to me is a more honest use of the alphabet.