It appears that is has finally happened, there are no longer any people doing any work. Not quite that, but getting closer every day. It has finally gotten to the point where it is almost impossible to contact a person in an office, all you can do is surf through the computer automated menu systems in the hopes of stumbling upon whatever it is that you are attempting to do. For example, once upon a time it was possible to call the County building department to ask a question – no longer. Now it is all about menu upon menu upon menu, but no people involved. I just spent an hour attempting to find out how to talk to a person that could help me figure out what permits might be needed for some repairs that I want to make. All I really wanted to know at first is where I could do that – you know, simple things like the right department, right organization, and who knows – maybe an address out of the dozens of possibilities.
After almost an hour of searching through their long and extremely slow menus I found a place to contact a person – but of course there was no person there, only a voice message to leave my permit number and they will call back. Of course I have no permit number, that is what I want to get. I did stumble upon an on-line way to stand in line at the office to talk to a person. However, there is no indication of which office I could stand in line at, where that might be located, and if that office might be one where I could find information that I need.
This menu system is simple to navigate because it only has a few dozen paths to check out. What happens with the medical menu systems is truly awful because there are very few clues about which path to follow and it is exceedingly difficult to find even a place where they promise to call back (but usually don’t).
All of these menus have turned what is normally a 3 minute phone call into several hours at a time. If you need to do anything at all complex, it is easy to spend five to six hours a day listening to God-awful voice menu messages, almost all of which are not useful at all. Rather than being able to find about a specific service you have to wait through menus to get to menus to get to other menus – which often lead to nowhere. Is this the grand new future of AI? Is this where we get when the machines “assist” us instead of allowing people to help people?
Business and government are doing all that they can to get rid of as many “non-essential” services as possible. This means as many as can be eliminated by machines, moving the costs of using these cost savings to the customer/citizen. Instead of hiring people, they are making horrible automated systems whose main purpose is to shield people from being bothered by the people who use and pay for the services. And what happens to all of those “non-essential” people? They lose their jobs, their income and their security. They learn to live under bridges with their broken down shopping carts.
Why are we allowing this to happen? I understand the reason for businesses and governments to do this – they want to reduce costs and increase profits. That is simple. However, I doubt if it actually reduces any costs once you look at the entire system (homelessness, need for support from government agencies, lack of access to essential services such as health care, lack of feeling important, etc). The cost for putting people out of work has to land somewhere – usually with the individuals, their social network, and government.
It isn’t as if all of these people can just go to a different job – in most cases (or on the overall point of view) there are no “different” jobs. It seems to me that we need to be adding slots for people to provide important services as we rapidly automate our entire economic system, not just continue to put people out of work when a new machine or AI invention makes the person non-essential. We need to find important things for people to do regardless of whether a machine is less expensive or not. Do we really want to just have machines because they cost less? Don’t we know that it is more important to have a society that works together than to just make a lot of cheap things and cheap services that don’t actually work?
I am confused about where we are headed, and what is cause us to make the decisions that we make with regard to the relationship between people and machines. Machines (including computers) keep getting more cleaver about filling our (humanity’s) slots. Everywhere you look jobs and opportunities for people are being eliminated by machines, but no alternate opportunities are provided. The people are just discarded. We can discard machines, but what does it mean to discard people? How can this possibly be a good thing? What can, or should, we do about this? It isn’t like the substitution of machines for people reduce costs to the end user – those stay the same. However, they DO increase profits for corporations.