My Ex-Wife Makes Me Think Of AI

Let me explain.

Sometime in the last few days, an insurance salesperson stopped by my house. I wasn't here, but the salesperson left a note in the door, offering milestone congratulations to--well, let's say "Ethel," because my ex-wife is a perfectly exemplary human being who doesn't deserve to have her name dragged through this.

The thing is, Ethel doesn't live here. We split about thirty years ago. I've changed address twice, and she has changed considerably more often than that. We are both remarried. There is absolutely no reason for sales pitches to come after her at this address.

And yet, they do, with a fair degree of regularity. Sales pitches, calls from her alma mater, and now, salespeople knocking on the door.

I'm not mad about any of this. She's a perfectly lovely person, a great mother to our children, a respect professional in her field. 

But she doesn't live here.

Somewhere in Cyberlandia is some piece of software that today would be called AI that scrapes through records and phone numbers and addresses and follows connection to connection and spits out its conclusions about where marketeers might direct their attention, both commercial and political. And that software is only sort of good at its job. It makes mistakes, and once those mistakes are made, they shamble around the interwebs like a deathless cyberzombie. 

I have successfully corrected this bit of misinformation just once--after the third or fourth time some human being at her alma mater called for her here, at this phone number somehow, and explained to some poor embarrassed work-study underclassperson, some human being at the university fixed it, and I never heard from them again.

But that's because there was a human in the loop. For all the other mistaken organizations, I have no recourse. There's no place to contact, no center to complain, no manager who can be demanded to Get That Crap Out Of There. And as the various AI "agents" keep scraping and gobbling up whatever they find in cyberspace, I'm absolutely guaranteed that this error will exist in perpetuity.

And as the dead web disappears down the endlessly interconnected gullet of a bot centipede, all manner of errors, miscalculations, hallucinations, and errant crap will be scooped up, rinsed off, and spat back out into the web, and the live humans who are the butt of this self-perpetuating inaccuracy will have no recourse, no way to correct the record. 

This is one of the scary parts of the AI revolution. Not just that AI gets it wrong far too often, but that those errors become an irretrievable part of the record--and there's not a thing you can do about it. The tide of slop is rising and nobody has even the concept of an idea of a plan for a cyber-shopvac, let alone a reliable way to forward my ex-wife's mail.