Living With Artificial Intelligence.PDF Version
You can live with artificial intelligence. That is because you are alive. It is touted as the wave of the future. It may very well be. Most new advancements initially get dismissed by many and put in the “will never catch on” category. Yes, being alive, you may prefer to live without it. However, you may not be able to avoid living with it.
Certainly, Artificial Intelligence will be used to accomplish many wonderful things. Lives may be improved and enhanced. Fortunes will be made. It also provides ways to manage larger populations more efficiently with less effort. That is great for folks who appreciate being managed. It can make decisions for you. Is that good? It is great for multitudes who prefer others to make decisions for them. Thinking is work. Work is routinely avoided. Few people can concentrate intensely for perhaps an hour without getting fatigued. Limiting thinking is avoiding fatigue.
So far, I have only been involved with two aspects of Artificial Intelligence. That is with respect to voice cloning and customer service experiences. With voice cloning it works great.
With respect to customer service operations, it obviously cuts costs for companies. For this reason, they have all convinced themselves that it is good for customers as well. Let’s look at that in the light of reality.
So far, on balance, it is to the detriment of customers. Artificial intelligence is a virtual entity. Customers are living beings, only treated as if they are virtual in nature. Attempts to sound friendly and insightful are simply irritating. While expenses are reduced considerably on the parts of companies, customers are assumed to have all the time in the world, regardless of what each may earn on an hourly basis. How impressed will a guy making $100 per hour be with spending an hour dorking around with a machine for an hour trying to explain what his question is. This is a big disconnect which will eventually be to the detriment of companies providing the customer service.
It is important to understand the limitations of technology. Machines can only use math. Math has a basic downside in that all it can produce is a number. Numbers become accepted as reality. In the right circumstances a number is perfect. When math is used to describe human behavior or create it, math is completely flawed. That is why with economics – I examine the forces in nature which make the numbers what they are. I let the other guys, who are many, deal with models and statistics. I am always ahead of the numbers. I appreciate their work. It is there to be used as a resource for me to use when I need it.
The firms who adopt Artificial Intelligence for customer service operations see only their new cost savings. The number attached to that looks good. No focus on how it affects business overall, no worries as to how many customers it eventually runs off.
Customer service has been technology based for a long time. For myself, if I end up going to customer service, it is only because of something so bizarre that it requires an actual sentient being to figure it out. It. With Artificial Intelligence customer service, my goal turns out to be finding a way to get past it and talk to a real person.
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I have to confess. I was born without the capacity to indulge in euphemisms. From birth, I have never been able to take comfort in something that is untrue and certainly could not believe something was true when it wasn’t. As a small child there was not even one second when I believed in Santa Clause. In elementary school, I remember having an epiphany that teachers were as likely to lie as were the children.