My father is getting old. Not old enough for me to beat him in tennis, unfortunately, but he’s getting there. I can tell because my father, like most people over the age of 55, claims he knows artificial intelligence can make mistakes, and yet he believes it like it were a bloody prophet. Grok has become his go-to for everything. No matter the subject, he’ll ask Grok’s opinion. But I don’t care what Grok has to say; I’m trying to have a conversation with my dad, not with a pretentious know-it-all computer.
Unfortunately, there’s no changing his behaviour; the seniors who use AI believe in it too much to renounce it. It’s so futuristic for them; they can’t fathom the idea that something so technologically advanced could possibly make a mistake. 
Unfortunately, not all technological advancements are improvements. For example, the mind-blowingly complex steer-by-wire system (SBW) in the Tesla Cybertruck is a technological marvel, but it’s as impressive as it is irritating. 

Granny, I know you’re reading this, and you probably don’t know what a steer-by-wire system is, so let me explain: 
SBW is a steering system that completely disconnects the steering wheel from the front wheels. If we take your car as an example, you have a metal rod going from your steering wheel, connected to a set of gears, additional rods, and a hydraulic pump at the end that pushes and pulls the front wheels in the direction you want them to go. It’s a system as old as Earth itself, and it works flawlessly, so Tesla changed it.
The SBW system in the Cybertruck is an agonisingly complex set of sensors that communicate with a computer that translates your inputs into 1s and 0s. Depending on the speed at which the car is travelling and your steering angle, it will determine how much steering angle you really wanted, changing the steering ratio at will, as opposed to traditional steering systems that have a fixed ratio. Ultimately, it disconnects the steering wheel from the wheels. I have no idea why that’s better.

I was always told “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”, but I guess Elon Musk doesn’t believe in that. 

Ironically, Mr Musk is also responsible for Grok, the AI my father has emotionally adopted as his fifth child. 
Grok is, to me, like the Steer-By-Wire system, and Google is the traditional steering rack. Nothing was wrong with Googling stuff; it might take you a few minutes to find your answer because you had to jump from Wikipedia to Reddit and then confirm your findings in a super-niche forum conversation dating back to 2012, but you had the answer. Grok does the website-jumping for you, and pukes out the answer it thinks is the most accurate – but not necessarily the correct one. Contrary to what most baby boomers believe, AI doesn’t think; it simply vomits what it was taught. It has the capacity to learn, yes, but not to make deductions based on reason. It will, with all the confidence in the world, give you incorrect information. 
Do you remember when Redditors ganged up and bought hundreds of millions of GameStop stock so that the price would go up and make hedge funds lose ungodly amounts of money? Yeah, well, if we ganged up again and plastered all over the internet that humans have six legs, AI would – without batting an eyelid – say “Great question! Well, it looks like Humans have six legs! Anything else I can help you with today?”

AI is dumb.
But the world is bowing to it like peasants to their king, because tech companies are saying, with all the confidence they can muster, that AI is the future. Matter of fact, it’s so powerful, it’s going to take over the world soon, probably tomorrow.
Confidence can change minds. And the Cybertruck is confident. It’s confident that its Steer By Wire system is fantastic, and it hopes to change our minds into believing it is. But not to worry, I am no old man; I am here to tell you that it’s the worst steering I have used in any motor vehicle ever (including tractors, go-karts, and jetskis).

Thankfully, you don’t have to drive this stupid-looking truck, because it drives itself.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a blessing. 

Once a month I go on a nice drive to a restaurant with my wife and my good friend Dustin. It’s a wonderful opportunity to spend some time doing what I love – driving and eating. 
In June, we drove the Cybertruck instead of the BMW. We used the self-driving feature as soon as we got in. Like magic, the truck reversed – all by itself – out of my driveway and onto the public road. I must say, for someone who loves driving, I can’t believe how nice it was to be driven. It was… freeing. On the freeway, I could dedicate more of my brain’s processing power to the conversation I was having with my wife rather than the road; it made me feel closer to her. 

There are multiple self-driving modes, ranging from Sloth to Mad Max, with three or four options in between. Sloth mode is too slow, and MadMax is, as the name suggests, mad. Too mad. We preferred using either Hurry or Standard. 
When we arrived at the foot of the wiggly mountain road we had planned to drive up, I wanted to take the wheel and feel what it was like to drive this self-proclaimed road-legal tank. Unfortunately, as you’ve probably gathered from the first act, it was not a good driving experience.
One of the reasons I love driving my BMW is because of the sensory stimulation it provides. The E46 is widely considered as one of the best modern BMWs thanks to its tactility and connection with the road. As a community, we all agree that the more a driver feels the road (without compromising comfort), the better. But the Cybertruck, with its SBW, has eliminated all connectivity to the road due to the very nature of its system. Hence why I only drove the truck up this beautiful mountain road for a handful of minutes; after that, I reverted to self-driving. 

Oh, but not to worry, it has so many other gimmicks that you forget how bad the driving experience is. For example, it has a megaphone feature that amplifies your voice through speakers located outside the truck. It has fart sounds for the horn. LEDs that change colour at the tempo of the music. The list goes on and on. As you can imagine, all these features dramatically improve the driving experience… 
This truck doesn’t care if you like driving it or not; I don’t think it’s meant to be driven at all, to be honest. I think you’re meant to be driven by it.

Ultimately, the Cybertruck and AI come with a very unique set of pros and cons. For me, the cons outweigh the pros, but I can see why my dad loves them; It represents what the ten-year-old in him hoped the future would be. 

Max.

PS: We ended up having dinner at a wonderful Italian restaurant called FERRO and used the self-driving feature for the drive home. It was a wonderful time. My wife and I sang songs together as the truck self-drove us all the way down the wiggly Highway 74. I look forward to the day self-driving will be available in a car I also like driving.

PPS: Holy blind spots!