Your call is important to us...
The effectual truth of AI
Over the last several years, I realized I was driving around town a lot to take care of little tasks that, in principle, could be done on the telephone, or on the web portal of some business or government entity. The frustrations of entering into that Kafkaesque world of chatbots that are “here to help,” or phone menus that seem imported from some generic template, are such that it is worth taking an hour to drive to the CVS pharmacy, or the DMV, or the UPS store, or some medical practice, and collar a human being. Usually they are able to solve my problem in short order. And increasingly, it seems, they are able to do so because they have some secret trap door that allows them to bypass the public-facing systems that I have to interact with. In the year of our Lord 2025, getting things done often requires finding, not the recent hire who just reads through the prompts on his screen and is trapped in the same hall of mirrors as you, but the guy or the gal with enough institutional knowledge to be able to thwart the system.
AI will get rid of those people. What then? The dystopia I fear is not one in which superintelligent machines achieve self-awareness and wipe out the human race, it is the prospect of a tightening grid of dysfunction and paralysis, achieved through the final victory of “the rule of Nobody,” to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt. The Nobody cannot be addressed.
Oh sure, there will probably still be a counter you can walk up to, with a very charming robot-lady behind it. Detecting the emotional register of your voice, she will express empathy for your plight. “I understand this can be frustrating. Let me see what I can do.” But this will turn out to be just a creepier version of “your call is important to us,” which is Business English for “fuck off, we don’t want to talk to you.”
AI will be the consummation of bureaucracy as regime-type. The official, Weberian appeal of bureaucracy is that it takes discretion out of the hands of individuals, who may abuse it, and subjects decisions to procedures that will be fair and neutral. It depends on having a comprehensive representation of the field to be governed, so one can subject its various parts to a rational calculus. But the conceit that one has such a representation in hand is almost always a fiction, nicely illustrated by the effectiveness of “work to rule” strikes.
These are labor actions where workers don’t walk out, instead they agree among themselves to scrupulously follow all company procedures to a T. The result is that production grinds to a halt, as intended. It does so because the indispensable lubricant that keeps the system running consists of all the informal accommodations that workers make among themselves, the work-arounds and horse-trading. You need to let Larry stretch his cigarette break out as long as he likes, because Larry is the only guy who can keep that one lathe running true, the one that is the real bottleneck in production. That is because Larry knows the exact spot you need to shim the tail stock with a .002 feeler gauge. (He brings one in his pocket, and removes it at the end of his shift — Larry is wise.) But the rule-book says nobody should modify the equipment without submitting a request through the proper channels. OK, then. Good luck, assholes.
The point is that bureaucracies build their legitimacy on the idea that they have rendered the field of forces perfectly legible, and can therefore exert a perfect mastery over them. It ain’t so.
The world of AI will a world in which we have gotten rid of all the Larrys. Good luck, assholes.
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 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.