Dueling Navigators
I got my first smart phone (only months ago) partly because my daughter who lives Down Under wanted me not to get lost. Siri will set me free, she opined.
And indeed, on my recent road trip, Siri was quite helpful. Until he wasn’t. I relied on him (my Siri is an Australian male) to tell me which roads to look for and when to turn. But sometimes when I was waiting for the next instruction, he went mute.
Fortunately, I had a human navigator, and she had her own Siri—a female American. I had a little trouble with the female Siri, because where my Aussie navigator would tell me to “turn left at the next stop sign,” Madam Siri would say “turn left in a quarter mile,” or “slide right in 500 feet.”
I am unable to judge a quarter mile while I’m driving. My odometer doesn’t measure feet, yards, or fractions of a mile. And I had no idea how to “slide” an automobile.
Nonetheless, it was sometimes necessary to have two Siris directing simultaneously to ensure that at least one of them would say something at the crucial moment.
However, our two Siris were sometimes at odds. That’s when the human navigator was most important. It was her job to look at both Siris, determine whose route made more sense, and translate for the driver. Sometimes even that did not work, and then it was necessary to pull off the road, command both Siris to stop navigating, and start them over to see if we could get them in sync. Or at least get one of them to say something comprehensible.
There were other drawbacks. Like when we had to stop for gas—and the restroom. I would generally put my phone in my purse when exiting the vehicle, and invariably when I was in the ladies’ room, Siri would repeatedly blurt out, in a stern Aussie voice, “Proceed to the route! Proceed to the route! Proceed to the route!” It’s just plain embarrassing to have a man scolding me while I’m on the toilet.
And there is just no reason for my Siri to get bossy. I’m always polite to him. I thank him almost every time he gives me a clear instruction. Yet once, when my human navigator laughed aloud at something insanely funny, my Siri referred to her as a kookaburra. That was rude. I’ve been to Australia and heard the kookaburras in the neighborhood trees. They sounded like monkeys. Very boisterous chimpanzees.
So, I started being a little less polite to Siri. Nothing really nasty. Just a bit of fun at his expense. I know two wrongs don’t make a right, but it felt like he was getting too big for his britches, as they say, and my human navigator and I wanted to take him down a notch.
Madam Siri never said anything untoward. She was never snotty or bossy or a smart ass. But neither was she particularly clever. She was deadpan Dragnet — “just the facts, ma’am.” And always with precise measurements that were difficult to judge at 70 miles an hour,
Is it possible for a robot to be witty without being rude?
While it is true that Siri set me free—to a degree—I made it a point to stop at the Welcome Center each time we crossed a state line and pick up a free map of the state we’d just entered. I’ve never had an argument with a road map.