We left the Detroit area relatively early. Good thing, because when we hit Ohio things got crazy. In addition to being constantly asked to narc on the cops, we kept being sent on spurious detours. I don’t know why both of our phones were giving out bogus navigation instructions. If it was just Anne’s phone, I would attribute these problems to her soon to be replaced iPhone. But my phone was also susceptible. The first detour was the one captured in the above corn field GIF. Because Google detected a construction backup, we were sent hither and yon through the cornfields to avoid this delay. As we barreled past cornfields down a one lane road, we occasionally caught glimpses of traffic still on the highway, still moving quite nicely, thank you very much. We were eventually routed back to the highway, only to encounter a real construction delay. Frustrated by the bedevilment of this malicious AI 🤖, we detoured ourselves this time and manually navigated around the worst of the delay.

Later in Indianapolis, this evil AI attempted to rout us off of the highway and onto downtown city streets, at lunch hour. We ignored the AI’s persistent and erroneous recommendations and made it through town just fine by following the same route we have driven many times before. There was a lot of construction going on, so it was with some trepidation that we charted our own course. This same situation happened again on our way into Saint Louis. For some reason the AI wanted us to take city streets through downtown during rush hour. I could plainly see that there were no traffic delays and we pressed on home. What a horror story!