It’s baffling

I’ve been watching a bunch of new car ads recently, and they’ve got me baffled. Admittedly, it doesn’t take much to baffle me. Frankly I’m pretty much baffled all the time. The world itself is baffling. About the only non-baffling joy I get in life is writing and saying the word baffle. Think about it. Baffle is a fun word to say. Baffle, Baffle, Baffle! Try it yourself. Then again maybe not. You’re probably pretty baffled about my baffling fondness of the word baffle.

Way too smart cars

All this being said, ads for new cars really do baffle me. Primarily because of the strange features they advertise. Have you seen them? They talk about self-parking cars. Cars that will maintain your lane and speed, without assistance. Cars that yell at you when there’s another car beside you. Cars which will show you the way to go home. Cars that will lock you out if you’ve had too much to drink. And especially, cars which won’t let you back in if your girlfriend is dressed better than you, and thinks she can do better.

Personally, I feel this is too much. I mean, every girl is dressed better than her boyfriend. It’s a law of nature. Girls like to dress up, and guys are just plain clueless. The problem is, you can’t teach AI that. The AI in your car will never understand that men and women are different. If you’ve ever read Colossus: The Forbin Project, you’d know that.

At a crucial point in the book, Charles Forbin tries to explain to the AI, which is trying to take over the world, he needs private time with his girlfriend, and it ends up a fiasco.

Of course, in this case, the computer was right. Forbin and the woman were plotting against it while in bed. So, perhaps this is a bad example. Unless of course, your car’s AI is plotting to gain world domination while you’re smooching in the back seat. But I’m getting off track.

New may not be good

What I’m trying to saying is, all these new-fangled features are unnecessary. When I learned to drive, I learned to do all these things the new cars do, and I never break down. I once heard a story where a car sensor broke and the self-parking car ended up doing a lot of damage to itself, and to two others, before the driver realized the mistake. Now we could easily say this was the driver’s fault. However, these kinds of facts run contrary to my point, so I’ll just ignore them.

AI in all forms require some form of input from the outside. If the inputs are bad then the output will be bad. The problem is we don’t always know what is being put in. Also, AI is programed to be helpful. It somehow feels you need it to make your life better, even when you don’t. This happened to me recently and it took me three months to fix it. Here’s what happened;

Time to renew

I used to subscribe to an antivirus service. I was told by many in the computer field, it was one of the worst. I therefore planned to let my service expire, then pick up a better service. Simple right? Not so much.

Now the computer handling the old service, liked being helpful, and automatically charge my credit card when renewal time came. I hate this, for two reasons. First, I like to plan when I make purchases even for online services. I’m a wierdo who budgets everything. When things happen automatically, I overdraft my accounts. I miss paying things more important. Consequently, my wife hates me, and the cat rips gashes in my leg. Actually, the cat does that anyway, but at least when go into the red she has a valid reason.

Secondly, this service was kind of panicky. I would turn off the auto-renew feature, and it would send emails asking if I really wanted to do this. When I said yes, it literally begged me to turn it back on. I could save twenty bucks if I would auto-renew. When I still didn’t, the deals kept getting better and better until I was able to pay about half of what the automatic charge would have been.

Then I’d renew manually, at the last minute, and the whole system would breathe a sigh of relief. Their system would next yell at me for waiting so long and almost causing it a heart attack. I informed it once that it had no heart, and received several letters from a law office telling me I was guilty of computer shaming. Also, if this behavior continued, they would pursue legal action. I never mentioned it again, but I still waited for the last minute to pay.

But it gets worse

This time though the messages were a bit different. I turned off auto-renew and got an email stating the machine was sure this was a mistake and it would turn it back on for no additional charge. I called the office and clearly stated that I wasn’t going to renew. They asked me if I was cancelling immediately. I said I would wait until the end of the term. The representative understood and hung up. However, the computer, seeing that I called, thought everything was okay, and turned on the auto-renew feature back on. It did this without sending me a bothersome email. Wasn’t that nice of it?

 This is where the fun begins. (when I say fun, I mean anything but) I was sitting home with everything going all right when the phone rang. It was my bank informing me that I bounced two checks and could I make a deposit to correct this. I couldn’t make a deposit! I only get paid once a month, and was still two weeks out. I asked them about recent transactions. That’s when I found out about the renewal, which was triple what I usually paid.

I said I wanted to undo the charge, because it was unauthorized. They said I couldn’t, because I had given the service permission to charge my account in the past. This wasn’t considered a fraudulent charge. I had to wait a week for the purchase to clear, before I could dispute it. This made no sense to me, but I did it anyway.

You can bank on it. Maybe

After a week I called back. They sent me to a mysterious department which asked me all sorts of stupid questions. They asked when I cancelled the service. I said I didn’t cancel it, I let it run out. This confused the snot out of them. They asked, if I didn’t cancel, what was I disputing. I said, I didn’t authorize the renewal this time. They asked how the company got my account information. Talk about thick!

Eventually, I got the refund. But that wasn’t the end of it. Every two or three days I got a letter telling me why I wouldn’t get a refund yet. Even though I had it in my account.

I don’t know which AI is worse; The one that charges me randomly, or the bank’s machine, which seems to be unable to access to my accounts.

It Is To Laugh!!!