We must always remind ourselves, regardless of the marvelous potential and technical brilliance of AI, its primary commercial justification is to cut down on payroll costs. It is not a breakthrough in digital technology, it is primarily an extension to it, a means of setting up automated systems that will replace expensive human employees. Not that there is anything wrong with this. I suppose this is the ultimate justification for all technology. By making a task easier easier or cheaper for humans to do, it inevitably means that human participation becomes less essential. But it doesn’t mean removing humans from the loop necessarily makes the outcome of that task better.

It used to be that if you had trouble dealing with an agency or company, you’d go to one of its human representatives and get it sorted out. Now you have to create an account, log on to a portal, talk to a machine and wait for an answer. And rarely does this machine have any idea what YOUR problem is. Even if in the long run it is less effective and ultimately less efficient, it is cheaper this way for management because now the customer has to do the running around that in the past was done by a salaried human agent. Unfortunately, the more complex any system is, the more prone it is to failure, the harder it is to install, maintain or change, the more vulnerable it is to criminals, foreign saboteurs and teen-age vandals, and the more catastrophic it is when it breaks down.

No one can deny that the introduction of artificial intelligence can bring many benefits to society. And I personally believe many of the fears and skepticism directed at AI, particularly its potential as a dystopian Big Brother malignancy, are highly exaggerated. But its recent promotion as a solution to all our problems is not motivated by its expected benefits for us, its primarily an anticipation of its benefits to its corporate promoters. What is ironic is that the people most likely to be economically hurt by widespread AI is the lower level managerial and administrative classes. Its not just customer service people and truck drivers who are suddenly going to find themselves out of a job. It will be clerks, programmers, HR people, and middle management.

I have enough cash in my bank that I am listed as an “Advantage Customer”.
That means that as long as I maintain a minimum balance I get free checks and checking, overdraft protection, paper balance statements in my mailbox every month and no-charge check cancellations and stop-payments. But the big benefit is that when I have a problem or question, I can talk to a knowledgeable human rep with a keyboard in front of him and detailed knowledge of bank software. The hoi polloi have to deal with a clueless fucking robot. The price they pay for being poor is they get sloppier service. Same as it ever was.

AI is not the technology that will take us to the stars, it is just the latest step in the automation of bureaucracy.