Another Encounter with Artificial Stupidity

This morning I was researching “learning analytics” and my search led, after many, many clicks, to this web page:

Note the purple chat window pop-up that appeared in the lower lefthand corner of my active window. Great, I thought, someone wants to know why I’m reading this page.

Here’s the ensuing dialog:

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   Nadia Dennis

Nadia Dennis

10:26 am   Hi, sorry to disturb 🙂
Can I ask which school you
represent?

Visitor

10:27 am   I have a nonprofit research organization called LO*OP Center, Inc. LO*OP stands for Learning Options*Open Portal.

Nadia Dennis

10:27 am   I’ll be glad to help, could I have your name please?

Visitor

10:27 am   Liza

Nadia Dennis

10:27 am   Nice to meet you Liza!  To know how I could properly address your concern, would just like to clarify if I am chatting with a student, a teacher or a parent?

Visitor

10:28 am   There are other designations. I’m an educational researcher. I also identify as a student, teacher and parent.

Nadia Dennis

10:29 am   Can we verify if you currently have Compass Learning in your school?

Visitor

10:29 am   If you want to have a meaningful conversation you’ll have to free yourself from your script. It’s not a school.

10:30 am   I’m not going to buy anything from Compass. Do you really want to chat with me?

Nadia Dennis

10:30 am   You may call us at 866.586.7387 or email successteam@compasslearning.com

Visitor

10:31 am   This chat is a fine example of ARTIFICIAL STUPIDITY. It does nothing to encourage me to contact Compass Learning again.

Read

Nadia Dennis

10:31 am   If there is nothing else, I’ll close this chat window. If you need anything else, feel free to reopen chat. Thanks for visiting.

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Poor Nadia Dennis. She flunked the Turing Test. I could not distinguish her from a robot — a particularly unsophisticated robot at that.

Increasingly I am encountering Artificial not-so Intelligent voices and typists when I telephone an organization or use “live” chat on the internet. Even when I can determine that the voice is that of a living human being that person is often reduced to serving as a computer peripheral. By this I mean that the person is constrained to read responses from a preprogrammed script and has no personal skills with which to address my topic or problem.

I have to admit to becoming verbally abusive when I find myself in either situation. Since the AI has no feelings (no matter how often it claims to experience  “gladness” or “sorrow”) my emotional venting has no consequence. However, no live operator deserves my expressions of wrath.

There are two significant personal consequences and two societal outcomes that I ask my  readers to consider and comment on.

1. Personally, I am usually angry by the time I work though the artificial stupidity and finally contact a human being who may be able to help me. I invariably look back on the whole interaction with sadness and regret. My day is diminished.
2. As an already somewhat isolated senior citizen I leave these interactions even more lonely for meaningful human contact. I am beginning to dread asking for help via phone or  computer. I have little hope that this situation will improve as I grow more frail.
3. From a societal perspective, it’s probably not a good idea for businesses to piss off their customers. If you do a web search using keywords ‘hate’ and ‘AT&T’ you’ll find plenty of evidence supporting the growing dissatisfaction with the customer service provided by this large corporation. Such frustration is not unique to AT&T. It begins when consumers try to contact the company and must thread their way through a maze of automated options and recorded voices professing delight, sorrow and desire to please. It often ends with a meaningless survey.
4. Perhaps the most dire consequence of our increasing reliance on simulated human-to-human interaction is what it does to employees. First it deskills a large number of them – – the human-as-peripheral effect I mentioned earlier. Second, it decimates the job opportunities for semi-skilled workers. Companies claim that they must automate to remain competitive and/or profitable. A follow-up effect of shrinking employment is the separation of the worker from money – the means of obtaining the goods and services their former employers must sell to remain in business. Third, it spawns a generation of young people who feel helpless. They are taught in school that academic success is the path to economic prosperity. But only the best and brightest are able to compete with well-designed AIs and robots.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a luddite battling against all forms of automation techniques. I am strongly opposed to two things: Bad Design and attempts to pass off or disguise machines as human. Poor design exposes us to one form of ‘artificial stupidity’ that wastes our time and fails to solve our problems or provide us with usable information. Clouding the distinction between the human and the machine demeans both types of entity.

So where is the light at the end of this dark tunnel? A clean, carefully-designed, clearly demarked human-machine symbiosis. Humans need to be being creative, non-routine, emotive, person-to-person. Machines should continue to be employed to augment human productivity and enhance human life and planetary sustainability. To reach these goals we humans must evolve new socioeconomic institutions that permit the wealth we are generating with our machines to be distributed broadly throughout the people of the planet. Education is one important key to such evolution. So now, having ranted at length, I’ll return to my search for tools to enhance human learning and teaching.