Sometimes we worry about inevitable man-machine war – something to do with the way they’re faster, stronger, and by their very nature incapable of enjoying reality TV (and therefore deserve to win). But it’s looking less and less like we’ll get an awesome laser battle and not when the machines can just tell us “Go die!” and we do it.
1. No Barrier To Survival (Unfortunately)
This is a GPS unit:
It’s a small screen showing you which way to go. When driving there’s another much larger ”wind” screen, and when the two disagree it is vitally important you go with the larger. An American family of four and their dog spent four days stranded in a bog after deciding that huge “Road Closed” signs, the general “heavy rainfall waterlogged bog” theme of the area, and the fact their car was sinking were negligible compared to Mr Electronic Voice. We hear of cultists being seduced into insane devotion, but these guys could probably be talked into suicide by a Speak’N'Spell.
Fortunately, or perhaps not, thefour were rescued just in time..- The only one we feel sorry for is the dog – it would never have marched forward into roads that were actually sinking, and it’s a dog.
2. Tourist Tracks
A quick intelligence test: what comes after highway, road, gravel road, dirt track, locked gates, rocks on the road? If you came up with anything at all, you failed, because anyone with intelligence would have turned back before getting that far. The same can’t be said for the tourists who powered into the single most inaccessible area of an Australian forestry reserve, which is about as inaccessible as things can get while still providing oxygen.
They then did their level best to solve humanity’s problem by leaving their car to walk their way out – in the Australian wilderness. After driving their car so far human technology could no longer help them, they couldn’t have got themselves deeper into the backwoods if they’d been hitch-hiking with serial killers. d.
Alas, Darwin was once more cheated by rescue workers.
3. Stuck In The Snow
“Toyota Yaris on a snowmobile trail”: that can only be an espionage code. Surely even the guys from Top Gear would insist on another car before driving halfway up a mountain and then deciding “Here’s where we leave the road!” In fact, not even then: they would have driven down mountains at least twice (go Hammond!) and never once turned off the actual “tracks for cars,”or as we call them, “roads.”
However, this was not so for one Massachusetts woman, who thought the tiny machine (which has no survival instinct or eyes) knew what it was doing when it told her to turn onto a track designed for snowmobiles – and before you start blaming the poor little thing, that’s because she’d programmed it to find the absolute fastest route without accounting for anything like “Am I in fact a polar bear, helicopter, or Santa Claus?”
