the:: Gap

I reported a food safety issue to a company whose product I had purchased. The issue was specific, the report was clear, and the company acknowledged it. They escalated the matter internally and initiated whatever process such reports require. They thanked me for bringing it to their attention. The email was courteous and the tone appropriate to the situation.

In 1992, Professor Alice Mallard wrote that artificial intelligence was still largely a matter of explicit rules—systems that reasoned by applying formal logic to defined inputs and producing outputs that could be traced back through the inference chain to their premises.

I sent a specific question to an organisation capable of answering it.

The question was simple, contained, answerable by anyone with access to the relevant information. It required no investigation, no consultation, no escalation to a specialist. It was the kind of question that exists precisely because organisations of this kind hold the information required to answer it, and people outside those organisations do not.

The reply arrived promptly. It did not answer the question.

At eleven o’clock at night, my phone registered that my location had been shared. The notification arrived the way these notifications do—quietly, as a line of text, the system performing its designed function of informing me that information about me was moving somewhere I had not directed it.

My energy account already exists. The company holds my name, my date of birth, my address, my email address, my mobile number. They hold these details because I supplied them when I opened the account, and because the account has been active long enough that the details have been verified, used, and stored in whatever system manages the relationship between us. The relationship is established. The record is complete.

I want to change the name on an energy account. The account is mine in the sense that I am the authorised person on it. The address has not changed. The service has not changed. The relationship between me and the energy company has not changed. The name requires updating. That is the complete description of the task.