Have you dealt with A.I. recently; was it a positive or a negative experience? Are you aware of how much A.I. has infiltrated your personal and professional communications? Do you know which human jobs A.I. cannot infiltrate? This pearl should bring this issue to your attention and what you might do about it.
Ask anybody what A.I. means and they will tell you “Artificial Intelligence”. The term artificial means that it is “made by humans” which is appropriate. The term intelligence means “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge”. Refer to the pearl “Your Knowledge, Intelligence and Wisdom” for a better understanding. The term knowledge means that you have “gained understanding through experience”. But computers don’t experience anything; they are told what and how to process their stored data
Personally, there are many wonderful things that A.I. can do to make this “human experience” better for us, but negative A.I. can be detrimental to that experience. When A.I. is used to help you, it is positive; but when it is negative and used to deceive, ignore or distract you from what you require, it should be discarded.
Bottom line, when we hear the term “Artificial Intelligence” we assume that it is positive, but A.I. can also be negative. When negative, it probably should be referred to as:
Apparently Ignorant: When A.I. is totally inadequate, without a clue, as to how to respond to your inquiry.
Apparently Inhuman: Because A.I. totally lacks the human ability to express compassion and caring.
We will now use the above "negative A.I." interpretations to discuss the two-fold purpose of this pearl:
1) To help you understand and avoid the negative aspects of A.I. when it hijacks your communications with others.
2) To make you aware of the types of the human jobs that can never be replaced by A.I.
To this end, lets first discuss how A.I. is insidiously interfering with you on your computer searches and on your phone calls.
A.I.’s Negative Infiltration of Computer Websites:
The purpose of A.I. seems to be to respond to you with an “opinion”. Refer to the pearl “What’s Your Opinion” for an understanding of why opinions can be in accurate, if not misleading or deceptive. When the A.I. opinion is accurate, exhibiting Artificial Intelligence, the response is helpful, but when the opinion is misleading it is very frustrating.
When A.I. is Apparently Ignorant of a subject it doesn’t know what to tell you so it gives you the same answer over and over again no matter how you rephrase your question─this is obvious when clicking on the “Chat” box on a company’s website. Those Apparently Ignorant A.I. chat programs dwell on key words you enter. If they can’t use those key words to respond intelligently and helpfully, they give you a useless, ignorant default response. Sometimes, Apparently Ignorant A.I. will even cycle into endless loops to prevent you from speaking with a human. This is because the company is too cheap and/or ignorant to hire experienced humans to better handle their calls or they are too cheap to pay for well-written A.I. code.
Then of course there are deceptive A.I. controlled websites that don’t care what your question is and automatically link you to something they’re pushing. Typically, when A.I. is ignorant of your subject it defaults to whatever message benefits the company. This ignorance might be due to the limitations placed on that A.I.’s programming or due to poorly written code. These companies are penny-wise and pound-foolish as noted in the “company sales” section below.
When A.I Hijacks your Phone Calls:
“Choose one from column A and two from column B.” It is almost impossible today to reach company representative directly by phone without having to go through a menu of choices, which is fine, until A.I. hijacks your call. In the past, you would go down their menu until you find what you want. And if that doesn’t work, you could always press the “0” button and eventually get a human on the line─not so now with A.I. Instead of going down a menu A.I. asks you for information that will never get to a human. So, when you get fed up and press the “0” button, instead of transferring you, Ignorant A.I. just restarts that same never-ending A.I. questioning loop. If you have an emergency, forget it, you will never get through. When a company uses this kind of ignorant, Apparently Inhuman A.I you should probably have nothing to do with them since they are telling you that they want nothing to do with you.
A.I. Alert! This is the beginning of the abusive era of A.I., so accept it, but do something about it. Most companies aren’t aware that they’ve just installed an ignorant, inhuman A.I. answering system or computer chat box. You must make them aware of their abusive system and hopefully they will do something about it if you'll need them in the future. If they don’t care or are too lazy to change, their loss in sales will make them obsolete instead of making them the cutting edge company they thought A.I. would make them.
A.I. Will Always Destroy your Company’s Sales:
Other than Apparently Ignorant A.I hijacking your phone calls to reduce your company’s sales, it promotes a customer-unfriendly attitude that sends them fleeing to your competitors who employ effective, human salespeople. Apparently Inhuman A.I. will never provide a caring human attitude portrayed by a human using their relator style that promotes rapport with your company. And, if you don’t establish rapport with a potential customer on their first contact with you, they won’t trust what you have to say and will go elsewhere.
Bottom Line: Apparently Inhuman A.I promotes remorse─making your potential customers regret that they ever contacted you─instead, they go to your competitors who have established human rapport with them.
Recent personal examples of how the use of A.I has ruined company sales:
About a month ago my wife and I started looking for a new car to replace her 19-year-old Dodge Durango that she loved. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted another Durango or to replace it with a Volvo, BMW or Buick SUV. I called the Dodge dealer who had just installed an A.I. phone answering system. I couldn’t get through to them after many phone calls containing long wait times and then being cut off. Fed up, I decided to go to the Dodge dealer and talk to a human, who was very accommodating; we made a deal, but my wife decided that she didn’t want another big SUV. While there, I told the Dodge sales manage about my experience with their new A.I. answering system, which will cost them sales: he was upset and said that he was unaware and would look into it.
I then looked on the Volvo website and found the exact SUV we wanted, that we had seen in a car show. I called the Volvo dealer to make an appointment to test drive that SUV, but again I couldn’t get through because they too had installed an ignorant A.I. phone answering system. Days later, we went there in person to check out that car. They were very accommodating, but had already sold that SUV two days before. I made the sales manager aware of their lousy A.I. phone answering system and they also said that they would look into it.
Frustrated, I decided to check out the BMW dealer's SUVs on line and found one or two that we might like. I tried to make an appointment by phone, but their ignorant A.I. phone-answering system wouldn’t let me through, so I used their on line A.I. Chat box to set up an appointment. After asking many useless questions it gave me an appointment day and time, but when we arrived, the dealer was not aware of our appointment and they were not very accommodating. Frustrated, my wife decided that she didn’t want anything to do with that BMW dealership and she walked out. I talked to the sales manager and again, he was unaware that his phone system and chat box systems didn’t work, much less his incompetent sales force who ignored us. He also couldn’t understand why the A.I. answering system gave me an appointment since that was the receptionist’s job. I asked him if he installed an A.I. answering system and he said that it went into effect that week. It seemed that the A.I. salesman had quite a week selling A.I. phone answering system to car dealers in our area. I told the BMW sales manage that he would lose many customers if they didn’t remove the A.I. phone and chat box systems. I also told him to get rid of most of his young sales staff that ignored us when we arrived to play with their cell phones.
Thwarted by these ignorant, inhuman A.I. systems, we drove to a nearby Buick dealer without calling first or without making an appointment. While perusing various SUVs on the Buick lot, a salesperson came out to greet us (something no other car dealer did) and asked us if he could help. We told him that their big SUV was too large and that the one next to it was too small and did he have anything in between. He said yes and showed it to us, which we agreed was a good size. We told him the outside and inside colors we wanted and he produced exactly what we wanted on the spot and made the sale. I asked him if they had installed an A.I. phone answering system and he said that they had a few days ago, but that nobody liked it—another victim of the A.I. salesman. I told him of our experiences with the other three car dealers and to drop that A.I. system or lose sales. This entire experience has convinced me that a company that survives on sales should never, ever use an ineffective, inhuman A.I. interface to deal with potential customers.
Jobs that A.I Can Never Do—Care Giving & Manual Skills
A caregiver is: “a professional, such as a dentist, physician, nurse, or social worker, who assists in the identification, prevention, or treatment of an illness or disability”. A caregiver is also “an individual, such as a parent, foster parent, or head of a household, who attends to the needs of a child or dependent adult”. And a company that wants to survive should care about their customers. People want to be care for by real humans who understand and care about their needs, which Apparently Inhuman A.I. is incapable of. This also applies to hands-on jobs such as medical and dental assistants, chiropractors, physical therapists, etc. And of course, it applies to manual labor jobs that take creativity and intricate physical skills, something A.I. is incapable of. I’m sure that you can think of many more jobs that A.I. is too inept to do; maybe even yours?
When Humans Act Like Inhuman A.I.
After reading the pearl “Can A.I. Think Like a Human”, it is obvious that A.I. think like a human. This being the case, it’s natural to think that humans can’t think like A.I.─not true; when at work, people can slip into incompetent, if not inhuman A.I. thinking. They are obvious when they give you the same exact answer, over and over again, no matter how you rephrase the question. Humans who think like A.I. robots are probably bored with or dislike their job or they are just too lazy to do their job. They may also think that you are too stupid to respond to—just because they know something they assume that you should too. In any case they should be replaced, which is probably their goal. Below are two examples of how a human can slip into A.I. thinking, similar to when A.I. hijacks your phone calls and dismisses you.
Example 1: We were checking in at the Buffalo airport for a flight to London, England. While checking our bags and receiving our boarding passes the heavily accented person helping us said that: “It is a British regulation that you fill out a specific form 72 hours before…garbled noise”. I asked him whether this meant that we couldn’t get on our plane unless we fill out the form 72 hours before and he answered: “It is a British regulation that you fill out that specific form 72 hours before reentering the US”. He then pointed to a sign with a QR codes to scan, which didn’t work on our cell phones. I asked again where we might get help filling out the form and again his ignorant A.I. response was: “It is a British regulation that we fill out a specific form 72 hours before returning to the US”. I told him to drop the “British Regulation crap” and give me an intelligent answer, but be couldn’t so we walked to our gate. We got the form filled out by real people on our cruise; it took over ½ hour of processing by someone who knew what to do, we could never have done it on our own and might not have been let back in the US.
Example 2: One afternoon, while onboard our cruise ship, I went looking for the dining room where we were going to have dinner that evening. I walked into an empty dining room and asked the lady monitoring it where the entrance was to the concierge dining room. Without looking up or even acknowledging that I was there she said: “There are three main restaurants on this ship”. I said that I understood that, but that I was looking for a specific dining area and she responded again with: “There are three main restaurants on this ship”. Undeterred from my quest I was more specific, but she answered again: “There are three main restaurants on this ship”. At this point it was obvious that I was not talking to a flesh and blood human, but instead an A.I. human. Before leaving to find a useful human, I said to her: “You don’t listen very well, do you?” She finally looked up at me in wonder as I walked away to find a human who could help me.
Bottom Line when Dealing with Negative A.I.
1) Don’t ask if they are human, they will always say yes. For fun, ask them what they had for lunch today; it might tell you what they are. Also, humans respond quicker than A.I. robots, which also helps to identify them.
2) Ask direct questions so as not to confuse an incompetent A.I. system. If they give you the same answer three times, they are an ignorant A.I. system; just hang up or exit the website.
3) If you can’t get a human by pressing the “0” button after a lot of useless A.I. questions; just hang up and try their website. If the website is useless, use the Chat Box and if that is useless, get off of the website and look for another company to do business with.
4) If the company's phone and website are useless because the company is ignoring you, give them a low rating and explain why, if possible, but unless you can view their ratings, nobody will ever see it.
5) If you actually want to do business with that company, just visit them and tell them that their negative A.I. system is ruining their company’s sales and reputation.
6) When an actual human acts like an A.I. robot, ignoring you or just giving you the same useless answer, tell them “You don’t listen very well, do you? And walk away.
I hope that this pearl has helped you to prepare for and deal with negative A.I. systems. You might also want to look into any A.I. system that your company is using to make sure that it isn't abusing your customers.