We all know that from a very young age, visionary techie prodigies like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (and later Mark Zuckerberg) changed life for all of us in a very profound way. Yesterday I discovered that adolescent boys are continuing to make their mark on our lives in ways we can’t even imagine.

Here’s the scoop.  I just got a new laptop to replace my geriatric desktop computer, which is significantly past retirement age. My son was helping me transfer files from the old computer to the new computer (and by “helping,” I mean he was doing it for me). Along the way, he was pointing out cool stuff on my new laptop, only a tiny percentage of which I will remember.

One feature he introduced me to was the little tiny microphone symbol at the end of the Google search bar. If you click on it, you can speak the term you want to search and Google will type in what it thinks you are saying. (I know that some of you are smacking your heads and saying, “well, duh!” but I freely admit I have a lot of catching up to do.) For instance, if you say “six seven eight,” Google will type in “6 7 8.” However, Google doesn’t always understand what you’re saying, so, for example, when my daughter said “Hogwarts,” Google typed out “wart warts port ports.”

Could these be members of Google's speech recognition software team?

But, Google has some strange quirks in its speech recognition software. Often, when it couldn’t figure out what we were saying, it would type out “New York” or even “New York New York the bathroom,” and once it randomly typed “Tom Selleck.” All that was puzzling enough, but then my son clicked the little microphone symbol and clapped his hands. Google typed out “poop poop poop.” My daughter tried “hahahaha,” and Google typed “boobs boobs boobs.” The only rational explanation for these responses is that Google’s speech recognition software team is made of up adolescent boys – the 12 year olds thought it would be hysterical to use “poop” as default search term, while the 15 year old boys had nothing but boobs on their minds.

I suppose this is all relatively harmless, but I have a nagging suspicion that the top secret code that will launch the nuclear arsenal of theUnited States is something like “boobs poop poop New York the bathroom boobs boobs,” and that, my friends, disturbs me.