Mistaken Identity

If like me, you are in your eighth decade or beyond, it has most likely happened to you. You are in a restaurant, a theater, a store, or on the street, and you recognize a friend that you haven’t seen in a while. You walk up to the person, and suddenly realize that he or she is not the person that you thought you recognized. If you are lucky, this realization occurs before you have accosted them. You smile pleasantly and simply move on. Otherwise, you touch the person, a major social faux pas, and then apologize for having made a mistake of recognition.

Have I ever done that? Probably. I hate it when that happens.

The truth is that we do not memorize each and every feature of our friends. We memorize their most striking features – the angles of their faces, their movements, perhaps the sound of their laughter or voice, and so on. And what we memorize is not enough to identify them uniquely in all circumstances. Artificial Intelligence algorithms make these same mistakes. An autonomous automobile can misinterpret a stop sign if it has been marred in some way. A law-enforcement facial recognition routine can fail to correctly identify a person because of their skin tone – a form of AI racial prejudice, if you will. Witnesses in criminal trials make the same kinds of mistakes. The truth is, let’s face it, all toe heads look alike.

Today, I went to the store and Susan went to the Gym. My shopping chores were uncomplicated, and I got home long before Susan finished her exercise routine. A bit after I got home, I got a text from Susan. She often tells me that she is done with her errand or chore and is on her way home.

In this particular text, she told me that she had attempted to break into her own car. Susan drives a 2007 Subaru Legacy that has very low mileage. Most of the time, we drive my Forrester. So, her old Legacy is a creampuff.

She had finished at the Gym, gone to her car, and discovered that it did not respond to her keyless entry fob. Shit! She put the key in the driver’s side door keyhole and discovered that the key would not seat properly in the keyhole. Fuck! She looked inside the car from several angles until she realized that the blue Subaru Legacy, she was trying to enter was not her car. Another Gym attendee had an older Subaru Legacy much like her own.

After a bit of reorientation, she found her own car that responded properly to the fob’s keyless entry signal. She didn’t even need to use harsh language to get the car to obey her request to unlock. Errors of mistaken identity are inevitable, but I have to wonder whether they are more likely in America with cars of Asian origin than with those of American manufacture.