Artificial Stupidity

Bender

Earlier this week I went out and ran some errands. All of these errands could have been taken care of over the phone if I had been willing to spend the day on hold talking to some robo-cop, but I wasn't, so got in my truck and drove around to the various outfits and dealt with them in person. I probably didn't save any time, and it likely cost me a small fortune in gasoline, but I didn't have listen to hours of public service announcements, static filled music and robo-cop voices telling me to press one for more crap or two for more shit. So it was much more pleasant.

I've been running into mentions of AI (Artificial Intelligence) here and there. There are people pontificating about how great or awful it's going to be, and some people are experimenting with having these entities create images or stories. That's all fine and well but it doesn't interest me in the least. I have sort of been wondering what AI could be used for that would actually be useful. Right now it's kind of limited to using data that has already been loaded into a computer. There is certainly a great deal of that, and it may prove useful in some cases, for some people, but I don't see any real world applications that would benefit me.

Or at least I didn't, but after my experience the other day I see huge application - an AI agent that can make phone calls on your behalf and patiently wade through all the robo-cop menus and sign / countersign identification procedures in order to take care of some of these simple issues.

Of course, this means businesses are going to start employing AI to answer customer service calls so we are going to have AI agents talking to each other to sort out what should be trivial problems. Never use a hammer to drive a nail when you can employ a super sophisticated robot intelligence to do the job.