John Gruber links to an interesting story about Dutch regulators fining Uber almost $1 billion for suspending dishonest drivers “without warning or human involvement.”
Say what you want about Uber’s practices, dishonest drivers, scams, and what have you. That’s not my interest in linking to the story. What struck me this morning was that phrase “without warning or human involvement.
It struck me because I’ve been dealing with a similar issue with one of my prescriptions that keeps getting changed. According to my pharmacy and my doctor, it appears that the change keeps happening without “any human involvement” because they are seeing this happen with other patients and customers on the same medication.
A few thoughts.
1. There is always “human involvement.” Someone made a decision at some point in the process. Otherwise it wouldn’t be happening. If the robots are capable of making these decisions on their own, I guess we’re headed to a world where the only legal remedy is to pull the plug. And we all know that ain’t happening.
2. We’ll never be able to track these decisions back to whomever is culpable. Although maybe we will if the AI responsible for note taking and code changes can actually do that job and maintain the logs responsibly, “without any human involvement.”
3. This kind of thing is going to replace the usual bullshit excuses we used to get when various customer service operations actually had humans you could talk to. Computers hang up more easily on customers than humans do, so the day-to-day customer service battles are going to become more frustrating than they are already. Who knew that AI was an acronym for avoiding interaction?
Looks like we’ll all be blaming the AI robots more and more in the future. For the record, I’m not a fan of shouting at the wind.
(Image from Jon Tyson on Unsplash
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