What I Don’t Want AI to do for me (Cecilia Peartree)

I recently discovered that AI is being trained to do something I want it to do even less than I want it to write novels or design book covers or publish social media posts. It’s organising travel.

Although there is very little point in making travel plans myself at the time of writing, because, for various boring medical reasons, I can’t actually travel anywhere for a while, I am no stranger to the task of organising travel. I must admit that in some cases (though not always) the planning process has been quite a bit more fun, or at least very much less stressful, than the actual travel. In fact I am quite tempted to start planning a trip now even without making any real bookings, just to keep my hand in.

Of course, the more complicated the trip and therefore the more fun to organise, the more potential there is for things to go wrong. I had several panic attacks in the time leading up to my ‘North American tour’ of October 2001, partly because I hadn’t flown since 1978 and partly because of what happened in September 2001. Still, it wasn’t quite as scary to be flying with Air Canada to Toronto as it might have been flying to New York at that point, and there were some large Canadians who seemed to have been visiting Scotland on a golfing holiday ahead of me in the check-in queue, and I found their presence somehow reassuring. I had organised and booked quite a complicated itinerary, mostly to do with my work at the time but starting with a short visit to my cousin and his family near Toronto. From there my cousin drove me to Ottawa to speak to a museum colleague at the National Gallery of Canada, and on to Ithaca, New York state, to discuss databases and image processing with some contacts at Cornell University. From there I travelled on my own, first by bus to Rochester, where I visited George Eastman House, a photography museum, before travelling by overnight train to Chicago. 

I strongly advise against travelling overnight on Amtrak in one of the reclining seats, incidentally. By the time I got to Chicago I was wondering if my travel insurance would include a hip replacement! I don’t suppose AI would have been able to advise on that.

In Chicago I visited the headquarters of the software company that provided our database for recording and tracking works of art, and then travelled on, using another overnight train but with a bed in it this time, to Cincinnati to attend part of a museum conference, and to stay in a fabulous hotel with a piano bar. Then back to my cousin’s in Canada via Greyhound bus. This meant changing buses in Detroit and having to promise my son beforehand that I wouldn’t set foot outside the bus station during my brief stopover there. One of my friends advised me not to travel by Greyhound bus at all – ‘it’s not for people like us’, but I survived the experience anyway.

Anyway, what I meant to say about all this was that I doubt if AI could have made a better job of all the bookings and timings and so on than I did in this particular case, and it was a wonderful experience right from the time my manager said, ‘I think we’ll have to send you to Chicago’ to the moment I landed back in Scotland.

I didn’t do anything as complicated – though there were some unexpected moments during my trip to Chicago and Colorado a few years after that – until I planned and booked a visit to a work conference in Finland by train and ferry in 2014. The planning stage for this trip was particularly enjoyable and I congratulated myself on leaving the right amount of time for changing from LNER to Eurostar in London and from Eurostar to the Cologne train in Brussels. 

However there were some hideous problems ahead only the following day, and I was very lucky to find a bed for the night in Malmo on the spur of the moment, and to be able to rebook my ferry crossing from Stockholm to Helsinki at almost the last minute. I don’t think, however, that AI could possibly have foreseen the train breaking down between Hamburg and Copenhagen any more than I could, and if I had relied on everything being booked for me and hadn’t studied a lot of maps and various different options for the route, I would almost certainly have felt even further adrift when I was stranded along the way

Edited at the last minute to add that I've found out in the last few days that there is something else that I very much don't want AI to do, and that is to masquerade as the customer helpdesk for any retail company from which I hope to get useful information!