The other day, I was transferring files and folders on my Mac, and I did something stupid. I don’t know exactly what I did, but subsequently a decree descended from the summit of Mount Microsoft. I was required to verify my subscription to Word 365. Okay. No problem. I tried. No good. Password not recognized. Really? I tried again. Still no good. These problems happen, right? We have all been there, right? The realization stuck me: I couldn’t edit or do any work in my documents until I sorted out the snag. Okay. I’ve got this. I’ll fix it. Microsoft’s bot gatekeeper wanted to send a code to an email account I no longer use or have access to (don’t ask). Okay, I’ll call the customer service people at Microsoft. Hold on, whoa, no such thing as customer service people at Microsoft, not for the at-home user, anyway. Try a virtual assistant? Sure, but that got me nowhere slowly. There is no phone number to call for assistance unless you contact an online technical support company, a subcontracting enterprise, which will charge a few bucks now and forever if the poor schmuck who can’t access files does not cancel immediately after fixing the problem. So there’s the rub. If you want help from an actual person, you must pay for something that ought to be included when you purchase a product or service. Point is, Microsoft and many other mega-corporations don’t give a bent penny about helping you once you’ve written them a check. If you want people support, you’ll pay more for each setback. Oh, sure, you can go to your manuals and poke around online forums for go-figure-it-out-on-your-own support, but chances are you’ll be more frustrated than ever and will waste half a day getting nowhere. To underscore the point, unless you represent a large business, Microsoft considers you a shift-for-yourself customer. Figure it out. You are on your own, Kilroy. Huge companies are too huge to care.
Same day that afternoon, I took break from my computer frustrations and decided to do some grocery shopping, always a pivoting distraction from routines. Wanting to avoid long check-out lines, I chose self-service. One just follows directions, tap screen, scan items using Universal Product Codes (UPC). Fine, okay. Should be a cinch, right? The checkout technology, I found, is not perfect. I’d swipe an item or two, and the help light would start blinking. Need assistance? Okay. I don’t know exactly how these things work, but I know they don’t work well. The light kept blinking on nearly every item I swiped. “The machine doesn’t want you to put your items there,” the obliging service person said. “No you can’t bag your cabbage here. Try it here.” “You need to swipe your driver’s license before you can add that.” Lights kept blinking. Over and over, the toting machine demanded someone come to where I checked my groceries until I felt, impatiently, like falling to my knees in despair. Mandates from the world of technology have captured us and our surrender is required. They, meaning the machines that oversee for us just don’t care because they are machines. More and more, non-humans have become the authorities we mustobey. Or else! Technology doesn’t listen to an argument, or care for that matter.
Unquestionably technology has changed the way we conduct our daily lives. Need for the humans to solve problems and conduct simple services has declined toward a purgatorial realm requiring little human interaction. Oh, sure, there are still a cadre of humans willing to help us, people who work for companies yet to switch exclusively to non-human services. These helpful people are in call centers in India. Typically they are paid less than $100 per month. As a result, we are leaving the human village and heading toward a megalopolis of robots.
For many of us, a typical day may begin with online shopping using facial recognition or index fingerprint to log on, a task completed without human interaction. After a Doctor Google search using several healthcare sites to assess a sciatica condition, once again without human interaction, one may order a Waymo (a driverless auto) to deliver one to a restaurant which employs food preparation done by a robot and then delivered to one’s table by a robot server. The day isn’t complete without a canoodle with one’s new and improved sex bot after which a little conversation with an AI counselling app to provide one with mental health support and guidance, which is sorely needed because one lives in a world without significant human interaction.
Technology has become the modern-day fast lane for all of us. Do it the automated way or forget it. Non-human gatekeepers (bouncers) have spawned cottage industries, people doing problem solving as folks have done for the millennia. JustAnsweris such a company which allows one to talk to (or text with) real people, experts from a variety of professions, but of course such one-to-one help comes at a cost. So rather than getting real help from the company one originally hired for goods or services, now comes an add-on fee. These new services amount to the modern-day equivalent of the old protection swindle. “Nice business you have there. It would be a shame if anything bad happened to it. Capiche?”
Naturally, or should I say unnaturally, a post-human world spawns loneliness and isolation. The second nature of technology alters everything. An acquaintance uses AI to chat through personal problems, so he gets therapy from a machine rather than a human. He told me he likes his AI therapist. For my friend, a non-judgmental, discrete, and supportive robot is welcome precisely because it is not a human.
Subjugation to technology must surely have its limitations or we somehow will no longer be human. That, then, is an ontological issue if not an existential one.