Human V AI

[Bill]

Here’s something that I found quite intriguing.

Yesterday Garry reported a robbery at an Orford convenience store stating it was on School Road. I grew up in the area but didn’t recognise the picture and what’s more, I didn’t think there were any shops on that road. It’s been nearly fifty years since I lived there, and the area has changed significantly so I used Google Street view to try and locate where this was.

It turned out to be the old news agent’s shop on Orford Green, now listed as a convenance store, so to avoid others getting as confused as me, I added a comment stating that it was actually on Orford Green rather than the nearby School Road. Google had clearly got things wrong, but it seems a younger generation would rather take Google’s AI interpretation over the word of a mere human like me. 😊

It was pointed out to me that the absolute proof was that postcode of the store was listed as School Road rather than Orford Green. However, to me, all that proved was that many large organisations including the post Office use Google’s automated tools when compiling large sets of data and mistakes can soon spread like a virus to other websites.

Google is very good but not without errors. For several years it had my company’s location completely wrong by several hundred yards and customers with satnav would usually drive right by us. Could be worse though, at least I don’t live at Martinscroft otherwise I’d be living half a mile away in the middle of an industrial site. 😊

Facebook report.

 

Bill 😊

[Confused52]

I think the council are to blame more than Google. Take a look at www(dot)findmystreet(dot)co(dot)uk. and search for school road, orford, warrington. This is council provided data uploaded by the Local Government association and shows school road extending to be a short stretch of the A50 with a different Unique street reference number (USRN) which extends onto what maps show as School Rd. On Street view look at the road name sign on wall on the North side of the A50 directly opposite the access to the Blackburne Arms.

Google often gets street numbers wrong but the shop entry should be put in by the list owner for the shop. Older entries seem to use Post code centroids and hence are mostly wrong. At the last house I lived in I used to tell people to put the postcode for the next street instead of mine into their satnav because the centroid for that street was right outside my front door!! That too was the council's doing!

[Bill]

Well, I stand to be corrected but when I were a lad, that shop was always thought of as being on Orford Green. I’ve just rang a couple of old mates who also grew up with me and they say exactly the same. I did manage to find an old map predating Google and that also showed it as being Orford Green so maybe it got changed slightly when they introduced postcodes.

Whatever reason, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have just a few metres of road with a different name, especially since the real School Road is well defined and ends abuptly at a T junction. I suppose the only way to really find out if it’s always been this way would be to go and talk to someone who’s lived there for most of their lives.

The point I was trying to make is that todays generation tends to accept online information as being absolute and without errors, especially when coming for a large organisation like Google. Other companies have used Google’s data now for nearly 20 years so any errors could easily become the de facto truth for a new generation of people.

 

Bill 😊

[Bill]

I think I’ve possibly worked this one out and if correct it’s not at all what I thought.

I’ve looked back at some of the oldest maps I can find, and none show that section as School Road but probably being so short it would be impossible to print on a paper map. This is a bit of an educated guess but prior to the construction of the main A50 route and possibly predating Long Lane, School Lane and Sandy Lane were probably the main route through Orford, exiting out onto Winwick Road, and back then it would have been little more than a country road carrying horse drawn carriages.

I did find a picture of the school dated around 1900 and it appeared to show the road running straight on to the bend where the Blackburn Arms is now and Long Lane at this point was the T junction. When the road was upgraded to a main through “A” road, a fenced off area visible in the old picture was removed allowing the road to sweep round and continue onto Long Lane with School Road becoming a T junction.

This of course was well before my time but historically, those few houses on what local people know as Orford Green were indeed originally on School Road. Viewed from above it’s easy to visualize where the original lines of the road were but today, one is a main arterial road while the other is a minor side road.

Other than Google’s vector mapping and maybe a pedantic council, I’m sure if asked, the people living there would say they were on Orford Green with School Road being a very different place.

Well, that’s given my aching bones a bit of a rest the grey stuff a bit of a workout. 😊

 

Bill 😊

[Confused52]

Yes that is what the old six inch sheets show. The legend School Road is only visible north of the school and in 1908 not present at all.

 

see here View map: Ordnance Survey, Lancashire CIX.SW (includes: Croft; Poulton with Fearnhead; Warrington; Winwick;... - Ordnance Survey Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952 (nls.uk)

I too would have thought it should have been Orford Green.

[Bill]

Wish I could have found that map, it’d have saved me a load of time searching but at least I’ve had a restful day and learned a few things. 😊

 

Bill 😊

[Evil Sid]

well i have lived in warrington north, bewsey, whitecross and sankey green all without leaving the house, according to various articles in the past.

i have always thought of the area as whitecross and whilst technically north of the town centre it is only by about ten foot or so.

when i first moved in it was classed as sankey green,whitecross on most of the post i received from the council.

then we had a shuffle of electoral boundaries and we got lumped in as bewsey and whitecross with sankey green being lost when they changed the road to put in the pink eye roundabout.

what we are now is anybodies guess and when asked where i live i just say that blocked off street at the side of the garage opposite the hospital entrance to A&E.....

 

[Confused52]

Very explicit description Sid. After the street name your full postal address is just the post town WARRINGTON and the Post Code. No area name as you know from your Council Tax bill you are in the unparished area of the town. Bewsey and Whitecross is just the Council electoral ward and it doesn't belong in the address, the council put it there for their own convenience ( the green bin stickers went out with the wrong areas on them this year - so that worked well! ) The description of the local bus stops start with Bewsey, and as you say Sankey Green disapeared with Sankey Way. If I describe the roundabout as Sankey Green Roundabout nobody recognises it until I say Pink Eye!

The six inch sheet revised in 1905 doesn't really suggest an area name, View map: Ordnance Survey, Cheshire XVI.NE (includes: Poulton with Fearnhead; Warrington.) - Ordnance Survey Six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952 (nls.uk), so I guess people have been making up their own for a century.

 

[Evil Sid]

interesting map that one. shows wilson street where i grew up but with only the old houses backing onto the railway yard the ones across the road from them were not yet built.

garibaldi street where my paternal grandparents lived,

what is missing is lilford avenue and the surrounding areas where my maternal grandparents lived. just shows how much had changed by the time i was born and also how much has changed since.

[Bill]

I’ve just rung my insurance company to cancel for the car I’ve just sold. Having gone through all the security checks and told them I wished to cancel, the system if it had any intelligence wouldn’t then have spent nearly three minutes explaining how they share my information with other companies if I wished to pay in instalments. Who writes this stuff!

The best part though was having given all my details to their so-called intelligent system, when they finally answered the phone, I had to repeat it all again to a human. Totally pointless and really annoying.

Here’s hoping the people writing the AI for self-driving cars do a better job. 😊

 

Bill 😊

[Observer II]

There,s a point Bill; if the people who write programmes for AI are stupid, where does it leave the AI ? !   😑

[Evil Sid]

a lot depends on whether the AI has the capacity for learning or not and how well it is programmed to do so.

similarly when they program the voice choices on the "intelligent" answer service it only tends to accept certain input eg "press 1". beep or no beep.

EE is annoying for that. when you call to check your balance instead of the usual "you have 'x pounds' and 'x pence" first you have to listen to the spiels about what great offers they have and after they have told you how much credit you have left you then get the options on ways to top up and at that point i terminate the call only to get a text sent to my phone to tell me that i have x pounds and x pence credit.

my gas and electric has a great system in place. four options going to pay or sending a reading, already payed or want to pay in full, having trouble paying, do you smell gas. the system recognises my home phone number so i only have to supply my date of birth and confirm first line of address. it has my credit card details and asks how much i want to pay or if i want to pay in full. it then tells me how much what the card ends in and asks for confirmation. once it has been okayed by the system then i get a confirmation code for reference should there be a problem. time taken at most three  to five minutes.

 

interesting discussion on the dinner time natter show about whether or not AI should be used to mark pupils homework and test papers to take some of the burden off the teachers. as one guy pointed out teachers need to mark the tests and homework to identify any problems the pupil might have understanding the assignment, something that an AI could not do at present.

[Bill]

The system I designed nearly ten years ago did a press one for this and 2 for that because I didn’t know how to use voice recognition, but it did things in such a way as to make calls as quick as possible for the caller. It’s still running this way in hundreds of taxi companies across the UK and accounts for over 80% of all phone bookings. No neural networks just carefully thought out logic resulting in calls taking on average less than ten seconds.

It took me well over two years to get right but I could have said good enough after a couple of months, and that’s what seems too be the case with so many of these automated systems. Companies usually employ contract programmers to do the job who in turn tend to use ready-made multi-functional software packages to speed up the process. These are just drag and drop affairs such that you can make a functional IVR system within an hour. So, without any real thought going into the process, we end up with these frustratingly slow and useless systems.

 

Bill 😊

[ninearches]

I was born in what was part of Sankey Green ,being Liverpool Road near the Ship Inn & Quay Fold. The only reference to Whitecross in those days seemed to be the wire works & Whitecross Homes which i believe were an early part of the Borough General. Whitecross ,to me , seemed to be back up Priestley Street towards Guardian Street .