Yet another heart stopping mobile phone warning about adverse weather conditions, especially shocking when it comes out of the blue – literally, clear skies and sunshine, that make a raucous alarm even more surprising.
We have had a number of these alarms recently and it really does sound (literally) as if the political powers that be are collectively covering their respective asses. To be fair we are also treated to pictures of horrendous flooding or giant-sized hailstones or equivalent, but elsewhere. Not in our immediate area.
I would always agree that it is better to err on the side of caution and to give general warnings where necessary, even if the bad weather conditions could be localized a little more precisely – but, there again, we do have transport options that make our locality wider than our houses.
I have now been informed that the ‘alarm’ was to tell us that the period covered by the previous ‘alarm’ was now over and we could relax. That it going to make my fraught drive into the centre of Barcelona, just a little bit more restful. As if!
I will have to wait for tomorrow to find out why swimming was cancelled this morning. And I asked Chat, and it appears that the closure was a Generalitat instruction that all sporting activity was to be closed until 3pm today. Everything explained. But a day’s swim missed.
As a general point, it is significant that I am turning more and more to Chat for information more than Google or the other search engines, in spite of the fact that Google has made the search more like Chat, and it is possible to have the ‘conversations’ as you search that make the job of research so much more interesting.
The problem as I see it is one of trust. For example, when I asked about the pool closure this morning, I got an answer with enough subsidiary information and illustration to allow me to believe that it is genuine and accurate. As indeed it was. But my checking for sources was cursory and my faith in the accuracy – and the willingness of ‘my’ version of Chat to tell me if something is not fully checked out – is becoming increasingly fixed rather than tested.
Google, for example, gave me a totally convincing summation of information about one topic that I was researching which convinced right up until I began testing the sources on which it was basing its descriptions. It eventually turned out that it did have certain items of authentic information, but it extrapolated from those bases and produced something that was superficially convincing, but basically fiction rather than fact. But it looked so good and it did list references, that again looked academic until you started testing them.
Chat does have a qualifier that states that “Chat can be wrong” and that everything needs to be checked, but that has the same strength and reality as the tick that you put at the end of terms and conditions so show that you have read them. Truth and reality are tricky prospects and AI is making them more and more fluid.
Which means that my entry into the blatantly make-believe world of Grand Opera in this afternoon’s performance of Aida in the Liceu, can be seen as somehow more real than the AI world which now surrounds us because, in Opera the artifice is up-front rather than lurking in the background!
