An old coworker of mine, Lao Zhao, asked me to test-drive a car his new company had built.
I told him, “Forget it. I haven’t touched a steering wheel since I got my license.”
He said, “You don’t have to drive. It’s smart driving. Just say where you want to go.”
So I said, “All right. Take me to the front gate of the old Dagang site[1].”
He immediately pushed back.
“Come on, man. If it’s already been demolished, it doesn’t count. It’s not even in the database. And that place was huge anyway—why insist on the front gate?”
I said, “When I was a kid, I could never figure out which gate was the main one. I thought AI would know. Doesn’t seem that smart to me.”
He said, “You have to name a place that still exists. Navigation software is geography software, not history software.”
So I tried again.
“Then take me to Poor People’s Great Paradise.”
The car started moving.
It did not head toward XX Dance Hall[2]. Instead, it drove down into the underground level of a convention center that had already been torn down.
Lao Zhao explained from the passenger seat, sounding almost proud:
“See? This is how intelligent the system is. It’s automatically taking itself to our maintenance center for an upgrade.”
I said, “Intelligent my ass. Why can’t it update online? Why can’t it ask me first? How much battery and time is this wasting?”
When we got there, the maintenance center looked like an arcade from the late 1990s. Every machine was demonstrating a different system feature on its screen, except there were no joysticks. Some were controlled by touchscreen, others by physical panels.
Lao Zhao said, “The information you gave just now was really important. We need to reflash it into the chip, so it’ll take a while.”
I said, “I never even told you where XX Dance Hall was.”
He looked confused.
“Is that a dance hall? Because according to our big-data analysis, the result was YY Bathhouse.”
I said, “YY Bathhouse charged 38 yuan for admission. The Poor People’s Great Paradise I meant cost 5.”
Lao Zhao nodded like that settled everything.
“Then there’s no issue. Car navigation doesn’t provide service for poor people who can’t afford to own a car.”
Then he said, “The upgrade’s still going to take a bit. Let me show you something fun. I built this myself: a ticket-enforcer tracking system.”
He pulled up a demo screen on one of the arcade cabinets.
“This blue arrow is us. The moving red dots nearby are parking-ticket officers. If one of them is on the same street as our car, the system gives a warning. I just added a new feature too—it can tell which direction the officer is facing. If their face turns toward us, the red LED inside the car starts flashing too.”
I stared at it. “Isn’t this basically Monster Hunter? How did you even get their locations? What, did you spray paint on them too?”
“Oh, that part’s easy,” he said. “The ticketing app on their phones was funded by companies like ours in the new-energy car industry, and the app has location permission. The feature you’re looking at is paid, by the way. So they mainly use it to ticket people who didn’t pay for the service, plus gasoline cars.”
Then he added, almost casually:
“Also, our company might be finished after the New Year. If I end up going back to G Corp, do me a favor during the interview, yeah? Send me the questions ahead of time.”
That was the part that finally made no sense at all.
Your company is about to go under, and you still want to sell me the car?
Then I woke up.