Scary Things

      "Halloween is a time of fear."

     That's what my eight-year-old grandson Davis said while we were driving through my neighborhood, many houses decorated in macabre fashion for the spooky holiday.  My own yard is also decorated with a darker theme, coffins lying on the lawn and skeletons propped up in threatening poses.

     Davis warned me not to go too far "If your yard has any 'jump-scares' I'm afraid I can't come to your house," he told me.  But I don't have any 'jump-scares.'

     The ghoulishness of Halloween doesn't bother me.  I do worry about artificial intelligence which is more real and urgent in its threat.

     Take, for instance, your vehicle's navigation system, whatever type or brand it may be.  They're all tied to some sort of artificial intelligence that we're told to trust.  But a couple years ago our navigator directed us around hairpin turns and steep roads on a mountainside.    Since there were obvious easier routes I let the navigator know this along with a string of vulgar epithets.

     "Please don't talk to me like that," came the voice of the navigator.

     OK, now that was just a little scary.  Doesn't it require some reasoning ability to figure out that I'm trash-talking her?  Or it?

     Maybe it's just a coincidence but in a couple instances since, the navigator has chosen routes for us that could have led to our demise.

     For example, when we were exploring around Michigan's thumb we decided to try to find a lighthouse there.  Our navigator told us it was less than ten miles away and mapped the route for us.  But we knew something was amiss when the directions given wanted us to turn down a private road in the gathering gloom of twilight.  

    No, thanks.  Come to find out, the lighthouse was located a quarter mile out from shore on Lake Huron.  Was our navigator plotting to make us drive into the drink?  Now isn't that scary?

     More recently Wendy and I became turned around trying to find our way back after driving to town in northern Michigan.  When the rural highway we thought would take us back to our campground instead to took us to isolated parts unfamiliar we asked our navigator to help.

    The voice promptly told us to make a left turn.  I didn't see the quote-unquote road initially as we were in the middle of a state forest but then I spotted two tracks that disappeared into thick brush beyond.

     OK, in the middle of nowhere, which seemed to be our present location, I was willing to try anything even if it felt like I was re-enacting every bad decision I had seen in those horror films of people driving aimlessly to nowhere.

     We turned as instructed, lurching and scraping through rather dense undergrowth, following tracks that seemed as if they hadn't been driven over in weeks.  But our navigator urged us to press on, claiming another road that I assumed was paved lie just beyond.

     When the navigator's voice instructed us to take another left, I stopped the car dead.  This time there was no recognizable road, just tracks up a sandy hill probably made by a skilled all-terrain vehicle driver.  No doubt had we even tried to go farther we would be stuck partway uphill in the middle of a thick forest miles from the nearest home.

     We turned around right then and there.  For a couple in their seventies, hiking any uneven ground could lead to catastrophic falls.  Did our navigator even consider those consequences.  I think it might have.  And that's scary.