Funny coincidence: I wrote this post this morning. Right now I am about to drive to the airport. To get on a plane? No. To find a person. I got an email from Delta Airlines telling me that my “trip to Seattle” had to rebooked. The thing is, I never booked any trip to Seattle. It was a trip returning from Winnipeg to San Francisco, via Calgary. But their computers somehow put me on a trip to Seattle instead. I went through all the usual things, repeating “ representative” into the telephone at every juncture of the phone menu (as well as some more pungent language) and finally was told by the robot that “ due to unusually high call volume” (I’m sure it’s super unusual), my current wait time is estimated at an hour and 20 minutes. So instead, I’m going to drive to the fucking airport. Right now.
I wonder if calling it a robot cunt triggered some subroutine to create a wait time so long that the caller gives up. I mean, I guess that would make sense so the poor shmuck who finally picks up the phone don’t have to deal with an angry person. But I never get angry at an actual person — how could you? It’s the Nobody that is so enraging.
I’ve done this. I was on hold and while on hold I drove to the place and solved it in person. That tech will remove this possibility in the near future really worries me.
I was once on flight layover in Montreal. About an hour before my next flight was scheduled to leave, I got an automated notice saying that due to weather, it was cancelled. They next flight the system had me on was a full 25 hours away. And since it was a weather issue, there was no offer of hotel or meal vouchers. Not wanting to be stuck in the Pierre Elliot terminal for 25 hours, I quickly got on the phone and bypassed all the automated prompts until I got to a human. She, too, told me that there was no other flight option available. Not ready to accept defeat, I asked if there was another flight heading to neighbouring city I could get on. From her end, all was full, but at the boarding gate of one flight, the agent said they had one seat open on their flight. Between the gate agent and my new friend Cynthia on the phone, we managed to cancel my original booking and rebook me on a totally new flight that said full but which somehow wasn't *quite* full. It took a full hour to thwart the system. I arrived at my destination after a flight and a drive just in time for cocktail hour! Victory.
My point? Not only was Cynthia on the phone able to eventually manually override the machine, but in that hour we became kind of like friends. It was us against The System. I could tell, I could truly tell, that she kind of got a rush out of it when I told her over the phone that the gate agent in front of me had just handed me my boarding pass. "You did it!!" I said. It was a victory for the both of us. How many little civic moments like that, moments of forced contact with perfect strangers, will be lost when there are no longer any human strangers to talk to. All those little moments we have with our fellow citizens - cashiers, bus drivers, bank tellers - will be gone. We will be more enclosed, more the center of our own little worlds, than ever before.
Once I was to fly in the afternoon to a connecting flight and then on to my destination where I had - meeting early the next morning. When I went to the desk for my boarding pass, I was told that my flight was delayed while they looked for a crew to fly the plane (?!) and that I would likely miss my connecting flight and my early morning meeting. I tried to cancel the flight and rent a car to drive to my destination instead. “The system won’t let me do that, ma’am,” the agent said. I got on the phone with Expedia through which I had booked the flight, and the gentleman talked me through what to do. He said “Insist that they get you to your destination on time by other flights in their airline or they will have to book you a flight on another airline that will get you to your destination on time.” I had NO IDEA that this was ever an option!! The airline indeed had to book me a flight on their competitor to get me to my mtg. Beautiful!!
For some years I've been working on a theory of bureaucracy that is somewhat more humane. Maybe. But I completely agree, this sort of institutionalized dishonesty is our trajectory. The computer scientists with whom I talk, being scientists, have a real hard time seeing this. They want to solve the problem, and don't want to think about what the business folk (I teach business) will do with their very partial, usually dehumanizing, solutions.
I am not smart enough to anticipate all the problems AI will bring. But perhaps there is precedent. I read a letter by a woman lamenting the advent of the spinning jenny, where the "work of 2000 was now the work of 20". The office buildings of my youth in NYC were filled with secretaries and clerks by the thousands. All gone thanks to the PC. Because of these inventions and other revolutions like them, we now enjoy the 37.5 hour work week, down from 60. hours. The problem is that we use our leisure time poorly. This is an educational and cultural problem. AI may give us even more free time. What it cannot give us is care, the personal care we all desperately need. This is parallel with your argument.
They don't want Larry the expert lathe operator because he is non-conformist, which is the very reason he's exceptional. The contradiction of the corporate/ bureaucratic class is that they desire exceptional results while stunting all of the natural mechanisms of human exceptionality. In the pursuit of a mean they can calculate they work towards suppressing the outliers who often make the magic, like Larry.
Indeed. Bottom up solutions, which are generally the only ones that work, are eliminated when those at the bottom are replaced by tech. Who will be left with the experience and skill to correctly identify the problems, let alone solve them?
Matthew, I'd like to send you the ms of Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote's Dinner Party, which is coming out from Routledge this summer. Erik Larson and Mary Harrington already have copies. It bears directly on your project. I'm taking a break from copy edit proofing hell as I type this. QDP also follows on from, and extends, Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020). (You can listen for free on Intermittent Signal). My email is dwestbro@buffalo.edu. Again and as always, keep up the great work.
thanks for this--it's a good analysis of work and the problems that come with the idea that efficiency is best served by setting up repeatable routines and the depersonalization of work.
Part of the problem, I think, is that every automated answering service since they were invented to get rid of the customer without changing anything, or even letting them get through to a human, is being called "AI"? And even then, that person you do get through to may or may not be able to change anything. They may very well by a minimum wage employee hired to bullshit you until you move on. And finally , even if they can actually make a change, hopefully they at least know why the rule was there in the first place before they do it. The new AI is not being programmed with rules. There is a flexibility that 'can' be there, along with the consistency and completeness that bureaucratically depends on its training data. But nothing is foolproof, though, because as I seem to remember somebody putting it: fools are so ingenious.
Yeah, we're screwed. AI instances will be the perfect fall, er, guys ... bureaucrats, politicians, and corporate overlords that are already slippery to be held accountable will now be even more slippery. New drug kills a bunch of folks? Oops. Blame AI instance 5.68. But, no worries, we've fixed it with 5.69. And 5.7 will be even better. Take more Soma and chill. Trust us.
I feel like your distinction between kinds — or "styles" — of technology (from TWBYH) based upon their philosophy of design becomes really valuable here. A.I. can be constructed as a tool which requires skill to use (where the works are transparent), or it can be a tool made to be as "user friendly" as possible, a way to replace people, and generally, to put them in the passenger seat (where the works are hidden).
Funny coincidence: I wrote this post this morning. Right now I am about to drive to the airport. To get on a plane? No. To find a person. I got an email from Delta Airlines telling me that my “trip to Seattle” had to rebooked. The thing is, I never booked any trip to Seattle. It was a trip returning from Winnipeg to San Francisco, via Calgary. But their computers somehow put me on a trip to Seattle instead. I went through all the usual things, repeating “ representative” into the telephone at every juncture of the phone menu (as well as some more pungent language) and finally was told by the robot that “ due to unusually high call volume” (I’m sure it’s super unusual), my current wait time is estimated at an hour and 20 minutes. So instead, I’m going to drive to the fucking airport. Right now.
I wonder if calling it a robot cunt triggered some subroutine to create a wait time so long that the caller gives up. I mean, I guess that would make sense so the poor shmuck who finally picks up the phone don’t have to deal with an angry person. But I never get angry at an actual person — how could you? It’s the Nobody that is so enraging.
I’ve done this. I was on hold and while on hold I drove to the place and solved it in person. That tech will remove this possibility in the near future really worries me.
I was once on flight layover in Montreal. About an hour before my next flight was scheduled to leave, I got an automated notice saying that due to weather, it was cancelled. They next flight the system had me on was a full 25 hours away. And since it was a weather issue, there was no offer of hotel or meal vouchers. Not wanting to be stuck in the Pierre Elliot terminal for 25 hours, I quickly got on the phone and bypassed all the automated prompts until I got to a human. She, too, told me that there was no other flight option available. Not ready to accept defeat, I asked if there was another flight heading to neighbouring city I could get on. From her end, all was full, but at the boarding gate of one flight, the agent said they had one seat open on their flight. Between the gate agent and my new friend Cynthia on the phone, we managed to cancel my original booking and rebook me on a totally new flight that said full but which somehow wasn't *quite* full. It took a full hour to thwart the system. I arrived at my destination after a flight and a drive just in time for cocktail hour! Victory.
My point? Not only was Cynthia on the phone able to eventually manually override the machine, but in that hour we became kind of like friends. It was us against The System. I could tell, I could truly tell, that she kind of got a rush out of it when I told her over the phone that the gate agent in front of me had just handed me my boarding pass. "You did it!!" I said. It was a victory for the both of us. How many little civic moments like that, moments of forced contact with perfect strangers, will be lost when there are no longer any human strangers to talk to. All those little moments we have with our fellow citizens - cashiers, bus drivers, bank tellers - will be gone. We will be more enclosed, more the center of our own little worlds, than ever before.
Once I was to fly in the afternoon to a connecting flight and then on to my destination where I had - meeting early the next morning. When I went to the desk for my boarding pass, I was told that my flight was delayed while they looked for a crew to fly the plane (?!) and that I would likely miss my connecting flight and my early morning meeting. I tried to cancel the flight and rent a car to drive to my destination instead. “The system won’t let me do that, ma’am,” the agent said. I got on the phone with Expedia through which I had booked the flight, and the gentleman talked me through what to do. He said “Insist that they get you to your destination on time by other flights in their airline or they will have to book you a flight on another airline that will get you to your destination on time.” I had NO IDEA that this was ever an option!! The airline indeed had to book me a flight on their competitor to get me to my mtg. Beautiful!!
I love this comment!
For some years I've been working on a theory of bureaucracy that is somewhat more humane. Maybe. But I completely agree, this sort of institutionalized dishonesty is our trajectory. The computer scientists with whom I talk, being scientists, have a real hard time seeing this. They want to solve the problem, and don't want to think about what the business folk (I teach business) will do with their very partial, usually dehumanizing, solutions.
I am not smart enough to anticipate all the problems AI will bring. But perhaps there is precedent. I read a letter by a woman lamenting the advent of the spinning jenny, where the "work of 2000 was now the work of 20". The office buildings of my youth in NYC were filled with secretaries and clerks by the thousands. All gone thanks to the PC. Because of these inventions and other revolutions like them, we now enjoy the 37.5 hour work week, down from 60. hours. The problem is that we use our leisure time poorly. This is an educational and cultural problem. AI may give us even more free time. What it cannot give us is care, the personal care we all desperately need. This is parallel with your argument.
They don't want Larry the expert lathe operator because he is non-conformist, which is the very reason he's exceptional. The contradiction of the corporate/ bureaucratic class is that they desire exceptional results while stunting all of the natural mechanisms of human exceptionality. In the pursuit of a mean they can calculate they work towards suppressing the outliers who often make the magic, like Larry.
Indeed. Bottom up solutions, which are generally the only ones that work, are eliminated when those at the bottom are replaced by tech. Who will be left with the experience and skill to correctly identify the problems, let alone solve them?
Matthew, I'd like to send you the ms of Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote's Dinner Party, which is coming out from Routledge this summer. Erik Larson and Mary Harrington already have copies. It bears directly on your project. I'm taking a break from copy edit proofing hell as I type this. QDP also follows on from, and extends, Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020). (You can listen for free on Intermittent Signal). My email is dwestbro@buffalo.edu. Again and as always, keep up the great work.
thanks for this--it's a good analysis of work and the problems that come with the idea that efficiency is best served by setting up repeatable routines and the depersonalization of work.
Part of the problem, I think, is that every automated answering service since they were invented to get rid of the customer without changing anything, or even letting them get through to a human, is being called "AI"? And even then, that person you do get through to may or may not be able to change anything. They may very well by a minimum wage employee hired to bullshit you until you move on. And finally , even if they can actually make a change, hopefully they at least know why the rule was there in the first place before they do it. The new AI is not being programmed with rules. There is a flexibility that 'can' be there, along with the consistency and completeness that bureaucratically depends on its training data. But nothing is foolproof, though, because as I seem to remember somebody putting it: fools are so ingenious.
So obviously true and right it’s amazing that it seems so revelatory to read in print
Yeah, we're screwed. AI instances will be the perfect fall, er, guys ... bureaucrats, politicians, and corporate overlords that are already slippery to be held accountable will now be even more slippery. New drug kills a bunch of folks? Oops. Blame AI instance 5.68. But, no worries, we've fixed it with 5.69. And 5.7 will be even better. Take more Soma and chill. Trust us.
Indeed, sir! Bravo!
Not to mention what the management does to the psychogeography.
Random comment: The head of your AI robot (I guess that’s what the picture is depicting) reminds me of Ichiro.
I feel like your distinction between kinds — or "styles" — of technology (from TWBYH) based upon their philosophy of design becomes really valuable here. A.I. can be constructed as a tool which requires skill to use (where the works are transparent), or it can be a tool made to be as "user friendly" as possible, a way to replace people, and generally, to put them in the passenger seat (where the works are hidden).