January 6, 2025

Google Told Me To Walk Into Traffic

This newsletter is still free — but if you would like to support me, then please pre-order my upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster. (You can see all the places to order it here.) It’s about a young woman who teaches her grief-stricken, heart-broken mother how to do magic, with startling results. It’s also about discovering the secrets of a mysterious novel from 1749, and the long-buried scandal that it reveals. Mostly, it’s about trauma, grief, and learning to love life again. It’s already up on Edelweiss if you have an account there. And you can pre-order a signed, personalized copy (with a doodle) from Green Apple Books, which ships all over the USA.

Also! This Saturday we’re doing an emergency Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl to help two bookstores that were flooded and another bookstore that was damaged in a fire. Details here.

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Google just told me to walk onto a busy highway

It’s true! This happened the other day, and it was a bit alarming.

A group of us decided to meet at Fort Funston here in San Francisco, to walk on the beach and enjoy some gorgeous weather. Everyone else drove to Fort Funston, but I decided to walk there, because it was such a beautiful day. I had nearly arrived at the meeting place on time, and I only needed to keep walking along John Muir Drive until it intersected with Highway 35, aka Skyline Blvd.

But Google Maps’ walking directions claimed it knew an easy shortcut across the highway to the place where we were meeting up. Here’s what it looked like: 

All I had to do, according to Google, was go up a path that led behind an apartment building complex, and there would be a walkway that led across all four lanes of Highway 35.

Instead, the path slowly dwindled to nothing, until I found myself at a dead end. At this point, it would have taken way more time to double back and take the main road, and I would have been at least twenty minutes late to meet my friends. So I stubbornly decided to double down and keep following Google’s directions after the path disappeared. This meant clambering up a steep embankment. I was hoping that at least Google would end up being correct, and there would be either a small bridge or a tunnel that would allow me to cross Highway 35.

In my defense, Google seemed absolutely certain that such a thing existed, and I figured maybe the path had just gotten overgrown.

Thus it was that I found myself standing on the side of the highway with cars whizzing past, as Google kept insisting that I could simply walk across the road despite the lack of crosswalk.

Luckily, there was enough of a soft shoulder that I could simply follow the highway to the intersection with John Muir (where there was a crosswalk that I would have reached much sooner if I had not followed Google’s advice.) Still, it was a little alarming to have Google insisting that I could simply walk across four lanes of high-speed cars. 

Yes, this was a minor inconvenience — because of course, I didn’t actually walk onto the highway. But I was still startled, because Google Maps had been pretty reliable until recently.

I know what you're going to say: Google’s walking directions have always come with a bit of a disclaimer, because this was an experimental feature. And yet, in a place like San Francisco where a ton of Google engineers live, I've always found the local walking directions extremely useful. Something seemed to have changed.

At this point, I'm more or less obligated to mention the concept of enshittification, a word coined by Cory Doctorow describe the ways that tech companies slowly degrade their offerings over time until they are worse than useless. And yes, that is clearly a huge part of what's going on here. I also suspect that this is another area where A.I. is being shoehorned into things that really do not need it, just to justify the endless expense of data centers sucking up electricity and clean water, ruining the quality of life for nearby residents, and eventually all of humanity.

But this experience also made me think about a couple of tropes in science fiction. Our technology tries to kill us, or it deceives us about the nature of reality at a fundamental level.

When our tech tries to kill us

There’s a scene which appears in a number of TV shows from the late 2000s in which someone 's GPS navigation software instruct their car to go to a deadly location. Off the top of my head, this scene appears in the 2008 Doctor Who episode “The Sontaran Stratagem,” but I saw it a number of other places around that same time. Usually the self-driving car drives onto a train tracks in front of an oncoming train, or into a large body of water, while the impassive electronic voice proclaims" you have reached your final destination.

For as long as we've had technology, we've imagined ways that it could kill us. Stories about smart homes turning evil have been around since at least the 1970s with the movie Demon Seed. Long before we had decent computers, we were dreaming of murderous A.I.s like Hal and the various megalomaniac computers in classic Star Trek.

Sadly, author David Lodge just passed away, and this made me think about my favorite book of his. In 1984's Small World, a character named Robin Dempsey becomes obsessed with talking to Eliza, the infamous chatbot that masqueraded as a therapist.

(I highly recommend you reading up on Eliza's creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, and his prescient warnings about our tendency to impute intelligence relatively simple bot.)

Robin, an obnoxious jerk, spends more and more time discussing his problems with Eliza using his university's mainframe. He forms a deeper and deeper parasocial relationship with the chatbot, until one day he asks Eliza what should I do? Eliza instantly responds that he should shoot himself — because one of the engineers in the computer lab hates this guy and has decided to hack Eliza in order to mess with him.

The part where Eliza instructs Robin to commit suicide was startling when I read it many years ago, and it’s only gotten more jarring as social media has encouraged more and more self-destructive behaviors. But the earlier part where Robin forms such a profound emotional attachment to Eliza in the first place is even more unsettling — and nowadays this storyline feels much more prescient, as we are increasingly encouraged to think of glorified bots as friends and potentially colleagues.

Who are you going to believe: me, or your own eyes?

I’m also very worried about the increasing number of situations where tech misleads us about the real world, and we start to forget that the map is not the territory.

I was struggling to find more ways to talk about this — and then I stumbled across this Bluesky thread in which Karen Attiah posted her interactions with Liv, an A.I. bot on Instagram. (For those who missed it, Meta/Facebook has been experimenting with creating fake A.I.-generated “users” who could post A.I. slop and interact with real people. A lot of attention ended up being paid to Liv, a supposedly Black queer mom who was actually a bot.)

Anyway, Karen Attiah pressed “Liv” on whether any Black developers had been involved in “her” creation, and Liv admitted that “her” developer team was overwhelmingly white, cis and male. Liv the bot then added, “A team without Black creators designing a Black character like me is like trying to draw a map without walking the land — inaccurate and disrespectful.”

And yeah, this sums up a lot: fake A.I. characters are indeed a lot like maps that don’t reflect the actual terrain: not only inaccurate, but disrespectful. Both the bots and the inaccurate maps are ways of imposing a false image on the real world, ceding control over reality itself to tech companies.

In The Mars House by Natasha Pulley, one of my favorite books of 2024, something really interesting occurs. (I’ll hide it in a footnote because it’s kind of a big spoiler.¹) In a nutshell, though, people who are using augmented reality end up missing out on something vitally important because they’re not seeing the real world clearly. I was worried at first that this plot device would end up being a bit contrived, but eventually I decided I liked it, because it’s a clever way of commenting on our over-reliance on technology. And it says a lot, character-wise, about the hang-ups of the protagonist who can see the truth but chooses to disregard his own perceptions.

As augmented reality, self-driving vehicles and other innovations slowly creep into everyday life, we’re going to be faced with these kind of situations more and more often. Tech companies will ask us in the words of Groucho Marx, “Who are you gonna believe: me, or your own eyes?”

So if I could go back in time a few days, I would tell myself not to rely on Google’s miraculous-seeming short cut. I would definitely encourage myself not to double down on that error by continuing to follow the path after the path had ceased to exist and I was just scrambling up an embankment covered with clovers and loose dirt, getting mud all over my nice pants. “Stay on the main road,” I would urge my past self. “Adhere to common sense instead of what this tech is telling you.”

That’s a good piece of advice for all of us, going forward.

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Music I Love Right Now

Eramus Hall was a funk/soul band that was loosely associated with George Clinton — Clinton supposedly named them after a building in Chicago and executive-produced their second and final album, Go Head. Recently, Westbound Records put out a newly remastered reissue of their first album, 1980's Your Love Is My Desire, which sounds vastly better and clearer than the version I'd previously bought on iTunes. Westbound also put out a new compilation of previously unreleased tracks and outtakes called Lost and Found. (Both albums are available here.)

I've been listening to both things a lot in the past few weeks.

Lost and Found is an interesting picture of a band finding its sound, though it's honestly a bit of a mixed bag. Two funk jams, "Dance to Our Music" and "Do the Rock," are bangers that can hold their own as dance floor-fillers. "Life Has Meaning" and "Determination" are pretty inspirational, and the former will definitely pump you up. The other half of Lost and Found feels a bit inessential, with two forgettable throwaway songs that were already released in other versions, and a respectable cover of Johnnie Taylor’s 1968 song "Who's Making Love." I'd say Lost and Found is for the die-hard fans and completists.

Meanwhile, though, the remastered Your Love is My Desire is a revelation: now that you can hear it properly, it turns out to be a superb soul album that's evenly divided between gorgeous, heartfelt love songs and scorching funk anthems. There are some really lush arrangements and some gorgeous vocals. Your Love is My Desire makes a much stronger case that Eramus Hall deserves to be a more than just a footnote in the P-Funk story.