the nines

Tryna pull myself together from weeks of ENTIRELY too much dealing with stupefyingly ornate and not at all intuitive “knowledge bases” and “instructions” and kaleidoscopic arrays of completely obtuse acronyms. Have I mentioned I’m old? Crikey, men, maybe I was never the one needing the jet cooling.

And maybe this is why AI is turning out to be spectacularly wrong or outright lying in so many instances. It’s lightning fast — sometimes gives me the feeling of falling back off a high wall, even as I can tell I’m still just sitting in my desk chair.

Even so, it’s kind of a third millennium incarnation of the blind leading the blind here and everything that has been bothering me for decades about the evolution of our society inheres this experience of getting my domain name from the now frankly evil Google to take up here at WordPress.

We’re going self-service… to the extent feasible, and the AI is here to both help us little old ladies join in and to help usher more humans out of their jobs… because, of course, corporate imperatives. They’re honestly NOT trying to persecute us. They’re busy making money for their shareholders. If you point out that it feels like a slick form of torture, they look at you as though a huge unicorn horn is growing out of your forehead right in front of them.

They don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s how things are done. It’s how moving and shaking supports people in the manner in which everyone wants to become accustomed. If customers can be made to help themselves, and any staff that might be needed can be somehow edged out of the system in cost-effective ways, well, that is a virtue because the shareholders will make more money.

I’m going to ask the AI here if it has a name it likes to be called. I’m going to need him — it feels like a him to me, again, when I’ve mustered the chi, to help me with the post editor and template tweaking. I’m going to suggest that voting thumbs up or thumbs down on bits of customer service is harassment, that a “neutral” button needs to be put right between them… or just wait for the customer to express themselves UN-prompted.

I was buried in requests for employee evaluations at my last doctor’s office. Every little thing. Like they’re saving a salary in the HR department if they simply belabor their patients with relentless questionnaires for every little or big thing. Like the self-checkout lanes at the supermarkets. You don’t get a discount for having done that work for yourself. Automated parking lots. It’s ALL about the bottom line… and you ain’t in it.

Your money is, but you disappeared.

The first time I ever had to give a thumbprint to cash a check that was written on an account from that very bank — 45 or 50 years ago — I was appalled. The teller said she was sorry but too many people show fake or stolen ID and it was now policy to get thumb prints. I told her this was going to backfire on our society in a big way. If you start treating everyone like criminals, too many people will feel demoralized and gradually decide to become criminals.

And they did.

When businesses and governments, institutions of all kinds, become more interested in saving themselves trouble than they are in the wellbeing and happiness of customers, you get rampant corruption, Flock cameras, flocks of security cameras everywhere, frickin’ laptops with thumbprint power buttons… has anyone looked to see what happens to their plates and glasses after a waiter has taken them from their restaurant table?

Are they taking DNA swabs back there to match up with your face on their cameras? Is it like the high end hotels setting bloodhounds after their customers to end up with thick dossiers of their every whim and taste and rung on the socio-economic ladder for future reference? Are they selling that stuff? Can spouses access those dossiers to verify each other’s fidelity? Do they fork it right over to the cops without a warrant? Is there some cosmic emperor collecting all this for some civilizational library on which to train his descendants yet unborn?

It’s spiritual sickness sickening us all. I’m not talking religion. I’m talking about the process of getting a We the People back… a society full of safe, happy, decent, loving, friendly, strong INDIVIDUALS who can’t be frightened into hating each other.

It starts with each of us.