What Automated Customer Service Tells Us About Artificial Intelligence

We live in a society awash in technological hype. The hype is not merely a matter of commercial hucksterism, or eyeball-grabbing media sensationalism, even if there is plenty of both behind it. Technological progress is also a matter of ideological legitimation of "the System" in this modern world where economic and geopolitical reality make success in "INNOVATION!" a major test of a social system's viability, as one conventional view of the Cold War's end shows--namely that Soviet-style socialism was incapable of coping with the microchip, in contrast with the capitalist West and above all neoliberal America.
Of course, we haven't been seeing too much INNOVATION! lately, not only in such areas as house-building or food production or medicine that the purveyors of tech-hype love to distract us from, but even in their favored area of "tech," and that for decades. Maybe the Soviets' deficiencies in information technology really did hurt them at the time--but one can wonder about that given that in the same years American productivity growth was poor, and the computers didn't seem to be helping much, as Robert Solow famously pointed out. And things haven't got a lot better since that way.

One explanation for this that I have found useful is that the computer revolution has thus far been hampered by the limits of computer software in responding autonomously to the demands of the situations it is put in in a versatile fashion rather than doing the same thing over and over again, and that this is especially the case in the perception, navigation and manipulation of a very complex, constantly shifting, physical world--such that a decade after they were supposed to be hitting the market self-driving cars are still nowhere in sight, with the much-hyped advances in artificial intelligence apparently not changing that much. Indeed, even without having to engage the physical world that way consider what we are doing with the capacity of our "chatbots" and "generative AI" to manipulate text, sound, image--amusing ourselves with AI trailers, even as obvious applications change little, as we are reminded when we find ourselves forced to call a customer service line. Their voice recognition systems still don't understand a word we say no matter how much we dumb down our responses and how clearly we enunciate our words, while navigating the phone trees we find that the options are just as few and irrelevant to our needs as before, and that rather than solving our problem this way we try to figure out which way through the maze will lead to our talking to a human who may just be able to render a little help--such that the experience is pretty much the same misery it was five, ten, more years ago.

When the automated customer service systems get better, then I'll start taking the talk of AI's economic impact seriously.