JUNE 13, MONDAY

SANCHO PANZA

I am going to come down off my Don Quixote hobby horse for a while as I try to deal with the actual world around me.

Yesterday I was amazed again by Siri with a delightful Indian accent as he guided me through Apple Maps as I drove into town. I entered the address for my visit to the office of the Ear Nose and Throat doctor who was going to examine me and was guided right to the doorstep of the office. I was told exactly where to turn, even, thoughtfully, instructed to turn right at the next traffic light giving me a chance to get in the right lane. All the way I knew exactly how far I needed to go before turning. Siri’s voice was accurate within ten feet. How could Siri be so accurate and so thoughtful? In Paris, Apple Maps would tell us where the bus started, where we were on the busline, when we had to change, when we had reached our destination. I felt like sending my Indian friend a thank you letter for being so kind and helpful. Artificial intelligence is miraculous.

It also miraculously makes millions of choices a second when I am taking photographs with my iPhone camera and enhances the photographs both before and after I take them. I live in a magical world.

Then last night when I was trying to make adjustments to my train schedule around the United States I carefully wrote out my complete schedule so that I would know what I was talking about and then, at 9 p.m. phoned Amtrak. I spoke with a disembodied voice who discovered what I was trying to do and offered to link me with a human. She even asked for a call back number so that I could turn to something else while I waited. When the call back came I was instructed to hit #1 on the keypad to signal that I was ready. But the keypad would not come up, only the telephone dialing keypad. Hitting #1 on it led nowhere and the disembodied voice gave up in disgust. I dialed again on speaker phone, not daring to get a call back and this time waited an hour through repeated assurances of how important my call was to Amtrak and repeated assurances that Amtrak was the way to travel with advertisements for various offers.

Finally at 10:45 p.m. an agent came on line. He asked for my reservation number and then muttered to himself that he was having trouble with his computer and then asked for the reservation number again and then went silent. Hello, hello, hello, I said but heard nothing. He was gone. At 11:00 p.m. I went to bed.

I had been drinking coffee to try and stay awake through this process and now I couldn’t sleep. All I could think about as I lay there is that this disembodied artificial intelligence was guiding me through a Kafkaesque landscape with no people, only disembodied voices. Not only that, but I began to see a method in the insidious function of the algorhythms that some mad hatter was leading me through. They weren’t experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at all. They knew how many calls to expect and wanted to have a backlog so that Amtrak agents would always be busy. It was efficiency that was driving them, just as it is efficiency that keeps doctor’s waiting rooms full of people waiting so that the harried doctor will always be busy and couldn’t go out for a smoke and always behind schedule so that he won’t go over his Medicare allotted 15 minutes with anyone. I could understand why in the last six months I’ve never called any automatic answering system that didn’t claim an unexpectedly high volume of calls. It was built in.

A couple of other incidents yesterday began to shake my faith in computers and their efficiency. The Airbnb in San Francisco that I had pushed the reserve button on and entered my credit card number and even written a note to the proprietor inexplicably never reached her, getting lost in an Airbnb computer. I’ll have to start over. And the second night that I booked at a very expensive East Glacier Lodge turned out on my credit card record, without a confirming email, to be the Prince of Wales Hotel somewhere in Canada which I will now have to try and cancel.

I am left in limbo. The computer and artificial intelligence allows me to find the best modes of travel and guides me around, it lets me find inexpensive places to stay, it entertains me wherever I am with music and news and marvelous movies. It is wonderful.

And at the same time it is maddening and enhances the ways we shriek at each other, is a Kafkaesque world in which no human is responsible and everything is outside our control with no explanation. No one is responsible for the cancelled Airbnb or the wildly incorrect hotel booking. I couldn’t even change the Washington to Chicago segment of my ticket, for which I have confirmation after paying with cash to being a segment of my ten segment trip because all the rail pass slots are booked, even though I’ll be sitting on that same train. I wrote long ago of trying to find out why Memorial Mission Hospital was charging me $450 for a $15 set of eyedrops of which we only used four drops. No one knew, no one was responsible. And now that I am in this Sancho Panza mode, all Don Quixote dreams pushed out of my head, I will continue to wonder about the digitized world I live in.