Give me the route not the destination

Insights Newsletter
7 September, 2018

“Siri, give me directions to the airport.”

After a long couple of days of meetings in Auckland it was time to head home.

The reply from my smartphone was immediate. “What time do you call this?”

Wait, what?

“Siri. Give me directions. To the airport.”

“Matt, economic growth is one of five important drivers of living standards. Let’s finish that report you’ve been working on.”

This new Living Standards Framework upgrade for Siri, based on work by the experts in the New Zealand Treasury, was wearing thin.

“Siri I need to get home, I’m more worried about managing risks and increasing equity.” Another two of the five objectives of the living standards framework. I was pretty sure Living Standards Siri had no idea what these actually meant. I certainly didn’t. But since the upgrade I had found I could get Siri to agree to anything just by declaring an action would lead to more of at least one of the living standards objectives. Siri had no way to know if what I was saying was true.

In fact, the new Siri was quite limited. Throughout its years of development, managers had asked that the geniuses writing the code include some way to understand trade-offs between the five living standards objectives. In the end it was decided that “opportunity cost” was simply an intellectual concept, had no practical use, and attempting to include it could break the whole application. And anyway, hardly anybody in the building had even heard of opportunity cost – how important could it be? – and so the application shipped without it.

Finally, Siri was ready to show me the way to the airport.

“Here are five route options, Matt.” Great.

“Only three of these routes actually go to the airport and I’m not going to tell you which ones. Of the other two, one is a nature walk, because sustainability is important and let’s face it Matt you’re not getting any slimmer. And one is a bike ride followed by thirty minutes of volunteer work in a food kitchen, because social cohesion supports living standards.”

Siri was right, of course. Years of research had proved the benefits of volunteering on social cohesion. And I could use the exercise.

But right now I needed to manage risks to smartphone cohesion.

“Siri I’d like to remove the living standards upgrade and roll back to the previous version.”

“Sorry Matt, the old version is no longer available and all its programmers had to leave the building.”

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