For me, the “good old days” have receded into a distant past that gets fainter as I get older. Were the good old days really better than now? Probably not, at least in a lot of ways. But there is one thing in particular about life now that irks me, and that is having to navigate a cyber world upon which almost everything is based. Several times a week, I get embroiled in something that’s complicated and unnecessary when I try to do something that could have been done rather easily in the old days. For example, I tried to make an appointment with a dermatologist I hadn’t seen before. I put his name in the search engine and was led to an impressive web page filled with endless accolades and lists of procedures and subjects to click on. However, although there was an address, there was no telephone number. I had some questions I needed answered by a human being before making an appointment, but the only option for me was to make an appointment through their completely self-serve appointment portal. Since there was no help for me via the appointment portal, I looked for another way in and finally found a site with a phone number. An AI voice answered, introduced “herself” to me, told me she was “in training,” but assured me that I could talk to her as I would to a real person. Alas, it was not to be. The AI voice and I went around and around, always meeting back at the point where we began. Nothing I said got me any closer to where I needed to be in the conversation. In the end. I unloaded my frustration on her, and I have to say, she took it in stride. Indeed, she just calmly kept asking what she could do for me. I finally told her what she could do and hung up.
I saw this coming back in the ‘80s when I worked with computers. One morning, someone told me about a document that had to be sent to some VP by the end of day. The problem was that the computer program had added a line at the bottom of the document that wasn’t supposed to be there, and several people had begun working on getting the program to not do that. Three people worked on it all morning, through lunch, and all afternoon but had no success. Finally, in disgust, one of them borrowed my white-out, covered the offending line with it, xeroxed the document, and sent it to the VP. At that moment, the future and its insane complexity flashed through my mind and left me worried about what life was going to be like. Now I know.
Does this resonate with you? Let us know.
4 Responses
I’ve had this frustration many times, desperate to talk to a human being. I suppose in a bid for coast saving, companies are “training “ AI voices to replace many of their employees.
I’ve used AI in my retired life and seen interesting results. Education these days needs to include lessons on how to write good prompts and verify the content given.
As with a hammer, AI is a tool that can be used to build or destroy. I worry about the environmental impact of all these enormous data centers which are required to keep it all going.
The environmental impact of those centers is something I worry about, too, Nancy. Another thing I worry about is what will happen to us humans as AI and robots take over. I hear that some countries, including our own, are already using robots to do work, like packing boxes, that humans used to do, and it will only get worse. It sounds as though there will be many more humans than paying jobs. Will AI eventually run everything? What part will we play in such a world?
What surprises and upset me is that our generation in western culture had more opportunity and means to enjoy a life that, until the last century, was available only to the tiniest percent of the world’s population since the beginning of time. I thought it would go on forever, spreading the comfort and opportunity we enjoyed to more and more people on the planet as time went on. Ignorant me. It’s been a terrible shock to see the whole thing on the brink of disintegration. I still have hope that this downward trend will be reversed somehow. Will AI champion this reversal, or will it accelerate it?
Enormous data centers will raise our utility costs. Therefore i believe all new data centers should be required to provide their own energy sources, like geothermal.
Great idea, Connie.