21 October - Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence
The plan to produce another Places report
went off the rails because of unexpected events so it is trivia for today.
Bexley Council let me know that news of the
five new Belvedere Controlled
Parking Zones should reach residents some time next month. Local Councillors are
being consulted now and then a recommendation will go to the Cabinet Member. Presumably
two Councillors will be aware of the
commuter parking problem because they toured the
area and pushed for a solution 18 months ago. The Cabinet Member took a look as soon as he took on the role a month later.
Our four day old Councillor from Welling is probably clueless but the same would apply whichever candidate was elected last Thursday.
Meanwhile two bins in the road has proved to be effective.
Every
time I have been to Bexleyheath in the past two weeks I have seen men out
cleaning gum from the pedestrianised area. This photo was taken on the 14th October but
it was not the first sighting. There were two men working opposite the library
but I only got the one on camera because I was getting on a bus and there was no
time. I’d seen them in Broadway a few days earlier and today they were by the Clocktower.
The cleanup has been
funded by Keep Britain Tidy with a grant of £27,000.
Less Bexley related is news of Abbey Wood station.
The Next Train indicator I
called for a week after the Elizabeth line opened has -
according to Murky Depths
- been belatedly installed.
It definitely wasn’t there last Thursday as I was one of a party of three which
spent a few seconds working out which train was due out next and on Saturday I
did the same, albeit by myself, but with the concourse indicators telling me the
train on Platform 4 was due out in two minutes, it is possible i failed to see
the enormous big sign as I descended the stairs, but I doubt it.
There needs to be one by the escalator and the west end bridge too.
Nothing to do with Bexley but wasting a couple of hours was a banking tussle.
My only credit card which I can trace back
to 2008 expires next week. I thought I would enquire about the replacement not
turning up. I found the bank no longer has a phone number. App only. I had the
App on my phone but it told me that it needed to be updated, I did that but it
then said it couldn’t be registered. Tried again - same thing.
I tried the web page Chat on a PC but the Artificial Intelligence was useless. It eventually asked if I would like to
chat to a human called Megan. Megan took five minutes to wake up and was just
as useless as the AI; so I gave up. MBNA (now part of Lloyds) has already lost quite a lot of my business because I have had to use my Debit
Card for so called ‘pre-orders’ due for payment in November and later.
The ongoing losses will be very much higher. I found my current account provider was still happy to
talk on the phone when necessary although I actually signed up for the CC over the web. Easy.
I am not a total technology duffer but if companies expect me to use it with no
alternative available in the event of a failure; then stuff ’em. So that’s Amazon, Royal Mail and MBNA all
on the boycott list within about a month! Who’s next?
Bexley Council said a couple of weeks ago it was going to
move more into the realms of AI. God help us.