Weather Apps Don’t Work
I am a geographer. As a child, I was glued to The Weather Channel. By age 10, I had the names of every Illinois county memorized so that I could follow severe weather coverage on television. I absolutely love maps. Geography and meteorology are interconnected in many ways. With this in mind, I want to complain about weather apps on smartphones. (Inspired by a piece from KQED, Feel Like Your Phone’s Weather App Often Gets It Wrong? Experts Say You Aren’t Imagining It)
I won’t go into specific applications, but I will say that most of them are not reliable. In fact, I would argue they are dangerous in many ways. Anecdotally, I have had many friends who will get an alert on their smartphones that it will rain soon and then nothing happens. Why? Because virga on radar triggered the apps’ algorithm or programming to do so. What is virga? Well, it’s when precipitation is in a cloud but evaporates before it hits the ground. Over time, these false alarms will desensitize people when they receive phone alerts. An alert, in the future, may denote a severe thunderstorm, and the user of the smartphone app may brush it off because they’ve come to be conditioned that the application is not reliable. Even worse, people might have a false sense of security that their phone will alert them if storms or threats are in their area. (They won’t). That brings me to this rather obvious question: If these smartphone apps are so unreliable, why do people still use them?
If you’re wondering how I get weather information today, I have a radar app on my phone that does not contain alerts. I also have the National Weather Service website for my particular location bookmarked on all of my browsers. This is a relatively “old-fashioned” way to do it, but it removes false alarms. It also requires me to have a bit of a routine down when it comes to weather - I check the forecast and the radar on a semi-scheduled basis (a few times a day, based on the forecast - if there’s no rain forecast, I will largely ignore checking in).
This leads me to answering the rhetorical question above: If these smartphone apps are so unreliable, why do people still use them? The answer is because humanity is in the midst of the automation and outsourcing of thinking. Why put in the effort to do critical thinking if a data center could do it for you? Yes, I’m afraid, we are becoming that intellectually and mentally lazy. It will be our undoing. We’re so intellectually and mentally lazy that we will absolutely outsource our sense of the weather to an application that might not even be reliable. For years, we would listen to the local weather forecaster on television - trusting their training and expertise. However, just as we are racing toward automating everything to remove human work from our daily lives, we have decided to trade a trained, rather reliable weather caster (often a meteorologist) with a smartphone app because it got some good reviews (if even that).
Now for the philosophical question that goes beyond the weather: How long until your job and your expertise is downvoted and replaced by some unreliable online app because the novelty of automation has just absolutely taken humanity by storm?
There is a place for software, programming, artificial intelligence, and technology in our lives. It isn’t supposed to replace common sense.