How Google Got Me Lost
A lesson in trusting computers: don’t trust them. As I learned the hard way yesterday, if you’re not willing to do a small amount of human thinking, you’re at the mercy of a machine, and the machine is not always as smart as you think.
Case in point: I had a meeting with my sister last night at a place I’d never been. She sent me the directions in an email about a week ago. They said that the place was located
in St. Louis Park, just off of
highway 100 and 394. take 94 to 394 west, to 100
south, to cedar lake rd exit. take a right on the
first driveway you see into Parkdale Plaza. The
address is XXXX South Highway 100″
These are not difficult directions to follow, had I noticed them. Instead, however, I noticed the handy little icon on the side of my GMail screen that said “Map This”, like this:
So, sensing that Google Map’s directions to the place would be better than my sisters (and more techy!), I clicked that.
Problem. A sensible human being will notice that Google is offering to map a completely different address (one it had picked up from an earlier e-mail in the chain). So the map I received gave me excellent directions to the wrong place. If I had read my sister’s e-mail, I might have realized that.
Instead, I trusted Google to read her e-mail for me, assuming it would figure out where she wanted me to go on its own. Google is, sadly, incapable of having meaningful interactions with my sister via e-mail. So it got confused and got me lost:
