Last week I witnessed a fairly common but consistently frustrating sight.
Over the course of two days, three separate UBER drivers drove the wrong way up our one way street. There was no good reason for why they did. The weather was clear, the road smooth, the signs large and unmistakable. And yet when people waved the drivers of these late model Toyotas and Hondas down, alerting them to their potentially deadly error, they were stunned, throwing up their hands, saying, to a man, "The phone sent me." before executing a 9 pt turn, and driving away•
I see this shit weekly, and it makes me question many things:
- why does the Uber GPS do this? My GPS doesn't send me the wrong way. GPS isn't new. Uber isn't either. This is pretty simple.
- How do the drivers not notice? Do they not see the big ONE WAY signs? Or all
the parked cars facing the opposite directions?
- What does this foretell about our increasingly automated future?
- Who is fixing this? Is anyone?
Right now the bright minds in tech, business, government and other fields are busy figuring out how to automate and accelerate so much of our lives with AI. And while there are loud concerns about runaway scenarios, Terminators, and other killer robot sentient fantasies, I think about the steady flow of Ubers driving the wrong way for some reason between machine error and human, and ask, what do we do when we are going the wrong way?
We are great at inventing and adapting new technology to all sorts of problems, but pretty terrible at solving the problems that come from that tech.
We rush into designs for automated cars (flying cars!) with out correcting the basic mistakes of urban navigation. We move fast and break, but rarely stop to adjust and tweak. Eventually we need to, because you can only drive the wrong way for so long before you crash and burn.
I must admit, I dislike GPS and try to avoid using it whenever possible. I keep a (paper) Ontario road map in my glovebox and like to pull it out on long road trips to show the kids where we're going. It helps to give them perspective, instead of just a tiny snippet of our journey on a phone screen.