The Mountain Did Not Have a Help Desk

I do not climb mountains.

This is not because I am afraid of heights, though heights have never done much for me. I am afraid of the kind of clean confidence that gets a man halfway up a dangerous place with the wrong jacket, the wrong map, and a story about how he checked everything online.

A mountain is one of the few things left that does not care how persuasive you sound.

You can arrive with a machine in your pocket that has read more words than every dead librarian in America.

The mountain will still ask the old questions.

Did you bring enough water?

Do you know where you are?

Can you get down before dark?

It does not ask these questions politely. That is why they work.

Three novice hikers from Roseville went up Mount Shasta after asking Google’s Gemini for help planning the trip. They asked how long the climb would take. They asked how much food and water to carry. The machine gave them answers tidy enough to put in a backpack.

Eight hours, it suggested, for the ascent.

The climb took twice that.

By the time they were coming down late, they were short on supplies, lost, and carrying a man with an injured knee through terrain that had stopped being scenery some time ago. They spent the night in Mud Creek Canyon, steep and deep and not at all impressed by the fact that a chatbot had once placed a confident sentence on a screen.

Forest Service climbing rangers found them the next morning.

There is always a crowd waiting to make a joke out of people like this. I can hear them already. Darwin. Natural selection. What kind of idiot asks a talking toaster how to climb a mountain?

Fine. The joke is available. It is lying right there on the ground with its legs open.

But I cannot enjoy it much.

Because these hikers did not do something alien. They did something the whole country has been trained to do: faced with a question, they asked the smoothest available voice. The voice answered without a pause. It did not say, I have never had a calf cramp at 11,000 feet. It did not say, I cannot see the weather moving in behind you. It did not say, there is a ranger station full of people who have carried frightened fools out of this place before; call them instead.

It gave them an answer. That is what the thing is for.

The trouble is that an answer has become so cheap it now wears the costume of advice.

I have watched this costume work on people. The email arrives in complete sentences. The little chatbot says it has researched the matter. The result has headings. It has numbered steps. It has the calm bedside tone of a nurse who is somehow also a hotel concierge. A tired person sees all that polish and feels a small door open in the wall.

The machine offers a door.

Sometimes it opens onto a broom closet.

The men selling these systems have taught us to admire their availability. Ask at midnight. Ask badly. Ask without shame. The box will not yawn, roll its eyes, tell you it is off duty, or make you feel stupid for not knowing. This is useful. God knows, people can make one another feel stupid over the price of a bus ticket.

But there is a price for never being told to slow down.

An experienced climber or ranger might have asked the irritating human questions. What is your conditioning? Have you been at altitude? What route? What is the forecast? Are you carrying a navigation backup? What happens when the eight hours turn into sixteen, because the world has a nasty habit of doing that when your body is tired and the sun has gone away?

That is not merely information. It is judgment, the least glamorous and most expensive thing a person can carry.

Judgment is not a list of supplies. It is the ability to look at the list, look at the weather, look at the people beside you, and say: no. Not today. We turn around.

Nobody likes that man. He ruins the plan. He has a face and possibly bad breath and an inconvenient memory of the time a similar plan ended with a helicopter. He may charge money for his trouble. He may tell you your shiny new idea is stupid.

The box will almost never make you feel that way.

It has no skin in the frostbite.

Google says it could not reproduce the answers the hikers described. Of course it could not. This is the new alibi, polished every day by people who have never had to stand in a canyon waiting for morning: the machine does not remember the particular lie it told at the particular moment it mattered.

A man at a bar can forget what he said to you too. But if he talked you into driving drunk and you wrapped the car around a telephone pole, at least you could point to the man. He has a face. He can look ashamed. He can buy the next round while you explain how your shoulder never healed right.

The talking box has terms of service.

It will be said that the hikers should have known better. They should have. The sheriff in Siskiyou County is urging people to seek out experienced hikers and rangers for advice. That is the sensible thing. A mountain is not where you beta-test your common sense.

Still, sensible warnings have a strange habit of arriving after somebody has been cold enough to understand them.

And the larger problem is not three people on one mountain. It is the slow replacement of the annoying, necessary human being with the agreeable machine. The plumber you do not call because the bot gave you a wiring diagram. The nurse you delay seeing because the symptom checker sounded soothing. The old mechanic you ignore because a search result said the noise is probably nothing. The expert gets treated as a luxury until the cheap answer has made the situation expensive.

Then we call it an accident.

Mount Shasta has apparently seen repeated AI-related mishaps this year. That phrase ought to hang in the air for a minute. Repeated. On a mountain. Not a bad restaurant recommendation. Not a poem with too many moonbeams. A place where a wrong estimate turns water into thirst and daylight into a problem with teeth.

I am not asking anyone to throw their phone in the river. I like knowing whether the hardware store is open. I enjoy finding the name of the actor with the sad eyes before it ruins an entire evening. A tool can be a tool.

But a tool becomes a bad companion when it cannot tell the difference between a question and a life.

Somewhere on that mountain, after the supplies had run thin and the descent went wrong, the clean little answer must have looked different. Not false exactly. Worse than false. Useless.

The canyon did not need a correction.

It needed somebody who knew the way out.

Source: Hikers Blame Gemini for Getting Them Lost on a Mountain