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The predictive text on my dispatch app kept sending drivers to the wrong dock
Last Tuesday in Chattanooga, my dispatch system auto-filled a delivery address and the driver ended up at a closed warehouse 40 miles out. Apparently the algorithm learned from another driver's typo from 2021 and just kept repeating it. I spent two hours on the phone with their support line in Houston before they admitted there's no way to flag bad entries. Has anyone else had a navigation or routing tool double down on a mistake like that?
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william_harris9d ago
...and that's exactly the kind of thing I read about in a logistics newsletter a few months back. They did a whole piece on how these machine learning models just latch onto whatever data gets fed in, even if it's garbage. The scary part is the support people usually don't have any tools to fix it, like you found out. I remember one quote from an engineer saying the system is only as good as the last hundred inputs, which means one bad typo from years ago can basically poison the whole thing. Your story about Chattanooga doesn't surprise me one bit, sadly. It's like the software has a memory problem and nobody gave it an eraser. My guess is your only real fix is to just manually check every address before you send it out, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having the app in the first place.
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