If you’re annoyed and frustrated with AI phone service and chatbots that confuses rather than clarifies, you’re not alone. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
One wonders what we’re paying for via taxes, products and services, when we end up having to do so much of the work ourselves for nothing.
Let’s look at a day-to-day reality that is so ubiquitous it doesn’t attract the attention it deserves:
Digital services–the foundation of the digital economy–are dumpster fires we’re supposed to put out ourselves. The services are broken, dysfunctional rubbish, and yet somehow the agencies or corporations that are responsible for the endless dumpster fires of their digital interfaces have shifted the burdens of this incompetence onto the consumer / customer, who is supposed to put the fire out ourselves and make do with the smoldering sludge at the bottom of the dumpster.
Digital services are everything relating to customer service or customer portals / interfaces. The latest PR claim is that abysmal customer service will all be fixed by AI-based chatbots and digital assistants. Based on my experience, I beg to differ: the chatbots simply add another layer of incompetence and complexity to the wretched, time-wasting, frustrating mess.
All the work that once was performed by agencies and companies has been offloaded onto the customer. This is called shadow work: work we perform that isn’t paid or even counted as “work,” though it eats up our time and energy, leaving us less leisure and more frayed.
The ever heavier burdens of shadow work are a major reason modern life is increasingly stressful and harried: what was once done for customers as part of the service being paid for is now the customer’s responsibility.
I just spent–or shall we be honest and say “I wasted”– significant time navigating AI chatbots and a smartphone app which is touted as an AI assistant. The corporate entity is Xfinity (previously Comcast), one of the nation’s cartel of Internet-telecom providers.
Idiocracy shows the future of AI at the St. God’s Memorial Hospital scene and if you listen closely, the voice of Hank Hill makes its debut.
The Car’s Jr. kiosk is another of the glorious future that awaits a steaming fourth world turd banana republic under CPUSA (D) rule in perpetuity.
The republicants will probably go the way of the Whigs after the next (s)election as their usefullness in the Long March has expired.
I still have a dank artwork featuring Carls Jr. happy face stars as the new USA flag and preezy of the steezy Dwayne Alizondo Herbert Mountain Dew Camacho.
I’d love to get my hands on some AI just to toy with it!