The One Star Is for the Auntie Anne's

I've written before about GPS and location-based apps as transforming the way we experience the real world.

Death Valley rangers coined "death by GPS" more than a decade ago, after enough people drove into the desert because their screens told them to. In 2011 a Canadian couple's GPS routed them onto a seasonal road in the Jarbidge Mountains of Nevada. She was found 49 days later, alive, having lived on candy, trail mix, and water. He had set out on foot for help on the third day. Sadly, elk hunters found his remains eighteen months later.

Three novice hikers planned a Mount Shasta climb with Gemini as their AI Sherpa. Gemini gave them a confident map and schedule. They left their 8,400-foot camp at 3 a.m. and summited at 7 p.m.

Yay. Instagram photos!

Unfortunately for these intrepid mis-adventurers, AI put them at the top too late in the day, so they got lost an hour into the descent in the pitch black dark. At some point they decided to call the humans in the sheriff's office to ask for directions. They spent the night in Mud Creek Canyon carrying what the sheriff described, with what I imagine was an astonishing amount of restraint, "far less food and water than their group required."

Rangers found them the next morning. One of them fell and hurt a knee, but luckily everyone was mostly fine. For the record, the sheriff's office would prefer you call the ranger station first if you have any doubts about your hiking plans, not ChatGPT.

"Never rely solely on AI for your trip planning" is a sentence that I guess we should expect plastered on trailhead signs within the year, right next to the tick warnings. (I find the prospect of a tick the size of a sesame seed making me violently allergic to meat to be worse than an AI making me allergic to common sense, if I'm being honest.)

I have asked a chatbot for directions in a city I walk around in every day. I am not above any of this.

Look at this tree.

The New York Times is running a focus challenge in which you stare at an image for 10 minutes (a timer is included) without scrolling. This month it's Angel Oak on Johns Island, South Carolina. Six stories tall, a trunk 31 feet around, and limbs that run along the ground for nearly a hundred feet before deciding to go back up. The tourism copy says it is 1,400 years old, the arborists say 400 to 500.

Unfortunately, you can't take a core sample of a live oak (nor the virtual one, for that matter) to settle it, so the tree keeps both numbers. The limbs are carpeted in resurrection fern, which can lose 95 percent of its water, sit there brown and apparently dead through a drought, and green up within a day of rain. In 2012 a developer proposed 500 apartments about 160 yards from the trunk. A land trust bought the 17 acres surrounding the tree instead. Because the physical artifact matters. The image doesn't capture any of this nuance.

A 2001 study at the Met clocked visitors at a median of 17 seconds per painting. Jennifer Roberts at Harvard makes her art history students spend three full hours in front of one painting before they are allowed to read a word about it. Harvard also runs a freshman seminar called "Tree," where each student picks one of the 16,000 in the arboretum and visits it all semester. By the end some of them report knowing the tree better than some of their friends.

To be honest this might say more about the personality of Harvard students than about looking at trees... at least the tree never insists on you knowing it attended Harvard.

Jeff Jarvis was not moved by the NYT's tree. "What paternalistic bullsh*t. Mass media decry the attention economy as if they did not invent it. Their digital Calvinism is insulting. Stare at your own damned navel for 10 minutes."

He has a point about who built the attention-grabbing machine.

I have not done my ten minutes of staring at the tree yet. I saved the link, and now I've shared it with you. This is probably not the same thing as noticing the thing.

Humans are out of the loop.

From the abstract of a paper by Margaret Mitchell and two coauthors: "Not only do current approaches to AI agent design impede effective human oversight, but the cognitive capacities required for it are also themselves degraded by extended use of AI systems."

Whenever we hear, "AI gets it wrong," the thought leaders are quick to prescribe, "Put a human in the loop" to check the work of the robots. Human intuition and wisdom are better than artificial pattern matching, the thinking goes. The paper's point is that the loop makes the human worse at being in it. Agent systems, in its words, "passively incentivize the degradation of the very human skills they rely on."

Lisanne Bainbridge wrote "Ironies of Automation" in 1983. Automate the routine work, escalate the difficult choices to the human, then watch the human lose the practice and foundations the hard cases needed. The FAA said the same about pilots in a 2013 safety alert: "continuous use of those systems does not reinforce a pilot's knowledge and skills in manual flight operations." A 2025 Microsoft study of knowledge workers found the people most confident in the AI were the least likely to check it.

The takeaway in the paper: write down what you think before you look at what the machine thinks.

The one star is for the Auntie Anne's.

The Post collected one-star reviews of airports. Denver: "This is the reason AI will take over the human race." Dulles: "proud to still be 1963 state of the art." Miami's layout was "inspired by whatever resulted from a toddler knocking spaghetti off their feeding tray."

Dulles opened in 1962 and its Chrysler-built mobile lounges, which are glorified buses marketed as "plane mates," are still running, now named after state postal abbreviations.

Denver's welcome sculpture is a 32-foot blue mustang with glowing red eyes that killed its own sculptor in 2006, when a section of it came off a hoist in his studio. The locals call it Blucifer.

A reviewer said of Cleveland: "The one star is for the Auntie Anne's."

Auntie Anne's began as a stall at a farmers' market in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, in 1988 and now has about 1,200 locations, most of them the best thing in whatever building they are in. Or at least the most overwhelmingly intriguing scent in airports (and shopping malls, when those were still a thing). If you know, you know.

I'm going to be spending some time in airplanes over the next couple weeks. Looking at airport reviews is a choice, I suppose. Boston is not on the one-star list. J.D. Power has Logan tenth of twenty big airports, which is a B-minus. I'll take it.

Writing from Terminal E,
/ David

Listening: "Music for Airports", Brian Eno, 1978.