Great read. I had a glorified call center job in policy research a decade ago. Did phone surveys on behalf of govt departments and NGOs to gauge the efficacy of various programs. The so-called rigor of the studies required us to engage with participants in similarly robotic ways. Always hated it when somebody had a specific, actionable complaint or was otherwise desperate for help, and all I could do was bring them back on script, with the promise that their misery would be reflected in the statistics and promote incremental improvements.
> In training, we had been briefed on how to sound like Brenda [The AI Chatbot]. Brenda was chipper and casual, but professionally guarded. She was female and most certainly white, though no one had explicitly told us so. She said things like Sounds great!, Perfect!, and Sorry to hear that. She always brought the conversation back around to real estate.
> Once, a shift supervisor told me that a good tactic in these situations was to lean into Brenda’s robotic qualities. A little strategic obtuseness went a long way, and if the tenant still wouldn’t let up, I could start to repeat myself on a loop.
Reminds me of how Baudrillard said the simulation of the world will come to blend and replace the real one until the distinction loses all meaning.
I will never be able to talk to a call agent again and not consider the origins of their turns of phrase.
I once assisted the introduction of electronic invoicing in a project. The customer required a certain EDI format but allowed (for a limited time) PDF invoices to be sent directly to a processor specialized in fully automated processing of legacy invoice documents. The PDF had to fulfill strict requirements, most importantly containing real text and not scanned images.
As neither the EDI requirement nor the PDF format requirements could be met in time, scanned paper invoices were sent.
Lo and behold, all invoices were paid in time.
I never got rid of the thought, that the invoice processor, which, boasted their progressive fully automated analysis capabilities, was most probably a small army of underpaid humans. Didn't help that they were based in low cost EU country.
this is truly beautiful. also remarkable how a text about this topic can be so emotional and yet so distant and neutral, whenever other authors would fall back to platitudes or demonization of some development, she manages to step back and take another perspective instead. and its not just focussing on the human side but also a perfect portrayal of state of the art of production level agent systems.
I love this article but simultaneously it says so little. I think that she and I have very different values, and to me this would be "I had a job at a call center for 9 months after college."
I think the space between her and I is what makes this such a good read.
An interesting story, whether fact or fiction. The difficulty of receiving messages as “Brenda” from people in various forms of real-life distress and not being able to respond to them reminded me of playing the game “Eliza,” possibly the most un-Zachlike-like game ever released by Zachtronics: https://www.zachtronics.com/eliza/
