How many times have you been involved in a conversation with an automated voice, and you just wanted to scream until you got a real person? From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
The financial analysts gloating over the prospect of higher corporate profits resulting from firing workers overlook the collapse of customer satisfaction, productivity and leisure.
If AI is so great, why are we all wasting so much precious, irreplaceable time deleting spam, unsubscribing from junk email and dealing with multiplying layers of digital incompetence? 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.
Work that once was performed by the companies and agencies offering these services has been offloaded onto the customer. The customer must now delete endless spam, unsubscribe from endless junk emails, deal with security breaches, navigate incompetent third-party providers, fill out endless forms relating to privacy–a Kafkaesque bit of humor, given that our data is constantly plundered by hackers–and find their efforts to get anything fixed in the digital realm foiled by AI-chatbots and phone apps.
The horror stories are becoming ever more Kafkaesque. To cite one recent example from a reader, the process of qualifying as a professional healthcare provider for payment from Medicare was once a relatively straightforward submission of documents. Now it has been offloaded to a third-party provider–keepers of the inner circle of Digital Hell–which charges $3,000 for providing a truly Kafkaesque labyrinth of frustrating incompetence.
Recall that in Kafka’s final novel, The Castle, the castle is buzzing 24/7 with office workers who are too busy to answer the phone: the work is endless yet nothing gets done.
The phone tag rotation is the best usually with mchealthcarez where you get back to the original answering desk.
Love the mental health hotline answering machine audio with transcription probably circa late 1980s, press 69 96 if you are lysdexic.
Had to bust out some Brian Jonestown Massacre and killer dev version WWIII aviation wallpapers for zen and the art of morale maintenance.
Loved that stuff since finding pappys 1940s aviation mags as a lil’ shaver.
I have no faith in some law of robotics written by a human regarding AI and humanity is on its own regarding developing a new sentient being.