Teaching the machine a lesson

The forecast is frightening: Robots will take over all manual labor and self-generating code will automatically spin out the algorithms once developed by statisticians and programmers. What will mere mortals do all day long? Ride captive as our self-driving cars take us on a sentimental journey to see the parking lots where shopping malls used to be? Visit the local greenhouse to watch through the window as mechanical gardeners harvest hydroponic vegetables loaded onto drones optimized for doorstep delivery? Or just sit in front of a giant screen forever and ever while Amaflix Consolidated serves up an endless number of Arrested Development re-runs because AmaFlix knows that, no matter what clever new show we might tell our friends we are binge-watching, we are really just watching Arrested Development re-runs over and over again. Suffice to say: The standard error of Y estimates for X-axis values outside the range of observed data tend to be large for a reason.