Getting lethal with things
If... If only those chatbots that replace customer service agents were more useful or helpful than the average customer service agent... But no. I mean NO. I mean: one way or another, it is definitely a casting failure.
I have three simple propositions to explain why it happens.
Organisations (companies and public services) try to replace people who can not – here and now – act like stellar customer service agents, and that is a recruitment problem that can only be fixed by getting rid of the people involved in the recruitment process, including the people who give orders and constraints at the very top of the organisation. The day human-monikered-apps can tell which people are really toxic in organisations, then you may find me advocate for such tools, but right now things definitely get worse and worse for all of us, from basic interactions with public services to daily banking.
Organisations try to reduce costs with the most short-sighted approach of the moment, and well... that's the good old dog-eat-dog story. I can't wait to see the people who currently profit from writing stupid prompts for human monikered apps becoming the next people to be replaced. A little bit of Schadenfreude for their victims.
Or... this is a mix of dog-eat-dog and incompetence. Somehow it feels like both tragic and comic at the same time. In the meantime, after yet another stupid experience with some silly automation powered by some LLM that any people who can have a basic communication in different languages can eat for breakfast without breaking a sweat, I have decided to be lethal with all the chatbots that will cross my path.
I mean LETHAL. That means, I will do everything that I can think about to help bringing these things to retirement. The How stems from describing the chatbot-things for what they are:
- It's not human. A human moniker will not make a dog human, will not turn a heap of clay or any contraption of glass and metal into a golem. There shouldn't be any suspense of disbelief. Singularity has been an impending doom for over 15 years, and has not happened yet. Good old creator/creature complex.
- These things have no ideas of their own. They statistically assemble content found on the Internet, without regard for the currency, the legitimacy, or the applicability of the information. They vomit back a shiny version of the so-called content, in a cute package made of easy to read sentences. These simple sentences with A level words give a sense of simplicity to everything, including the most arduous topics, even those that deal with the essence of being human.
- These things ignore perspective and context. As mathematical functions constrained by the very logic of the processors they run on, these things belong to the axiomatic domain. As people, we express ourselves in the domain of semantics where perspective and context apply all the time in many human ways. It usually started as we were two year old. We are super good with semantics. As axiomatic is a small subset of semantics, these things make terrible assumptions and simplifications, all the time. These things are a bit like factories that manufacture answers with less understanding about anything than most humans have about happiness. If you ever wondered why translations are bad, this is fundamentally the answer you were looking for.
- These things have no legs, no arms. While these things may suddenly prevent me to do something I have done a million times before, they are still much less powerful than me, and I can do something to eradicate them.
Given all of the above, I have decided to never engage with these things with the view to obtain any service from them. I will only engage with them with the view to demonstrate their inadequacy and their irrelevance in comparison with any human being.
First option: Boycott. These things will be unplugged when they are not used. In the age of neo-liberalism, no organisation will keep the lights on in a factory that has no consumer and therefore produces nothing.
Second option: When boycott is impossible and I must go through, then I'll punch a hole through. The vectors are the rewiring of the logic and the rewiring of the dictionary. The expected outcome: the thing spits out non-sensical or out-of-line stuff. As a human, I am a master of semantics. These things are not and will never be. I'll only feed these things with imaged terms, broken syntax and broken grammar.
I believe that passivity implies that the pervasiveness of these things will format our way to express ourselves, and drive us toward the simple utilitarian languages used over the ages to control populations.