“Is this AI?” I said into my phone with a dull, monotoned — and yes, irritated — voice, not wanting to get duped again, forcing my brain this time to not speak to this robot as if it were a human. It was the same tone of voice I had been using for the whole call, which went like this:
"What are you looking for?" it said.
"Studio." I heard typing in the background. A fake chattering of voices, too.
"And, what is your budget?"
"About $1300."
"Great, and when is your move-in date?" "Wow, it is adding new words. Really?" I thought.
"October 1."
I did that before, in a previous phone call — spoken to this voice as if it were a human, varying my tone of voice more, as I naturally do when talking. He asked, “How did you find us, by the way?” and when he asked this question again (a mistake by AI, because a human would not say this again), I hung up right away. I felt this surge of anxiety arise. It was as if my whole frame of reference for picking up on AI was wrong, and my whole brain was not working right. I thought, “Can I really not tell if something is AI or not? If this is the case, how do I know who and what to trust? And really, if I cannot discern between AI and a human, am I even a human at that point?”
When, during this second phone call, the voice repeated that phrase, “How did you find us, by the way?” I needed to confirm my suspicions.
"No, I am not AI, ma'am," he said.
"Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry," I said.
"It's okay, I actually get that a lot."
"I was speaking to you so rudely, sorry about that."
"That's okay, ma'am."
"I am just relieved you are a human," I said, almost like I was now desperate to share all of my personal information, and laughed.
We resumed the call and I got my questions answered and he said have a good day and that was that.
I did call again, he answered again, and I said, “Hi again, I called a few minutes ago about scheduling a tour, and I actually am coming to Seattle in a few weeks and want to get my tours scheduled on the same day, is it possible to ask the property managers about two other apartments as well?”
I gave more information about myself to contextualize my question than I normally have. And, if our previous conversation had not gone the way it did, I would not have even told him that I called a few minutes ago. I would have just talked like a normal “patron” or “customer” to this normal “worker.” “I am just another one of his calls today, where I am asking the same questions, he giving the same responses,” I would have thought. “He is not going to recognize my voice in comparison. It doesn’t matter.”
We are trained almost like robots
We are trained, in a way, to be like robots in our jobs. I thought this person on the phone was AI because of how scripted he sounded – because he was.
But the training almost goes beyond the necessary questions for the job. The script includes phrases like commonly included when we interact with people intentionally (outside of work) such as, “How are you?” and “Have a good day.” This worker did not really care about my day, he was just representing the company.
I was receiving a virtual tour from an apartment worker and she showed me the studio.
“This is our studio, it is furnished, priced at $1600, and we require a security deposit and first month’s rent upon move in.”
She walked me to the kitchen and the bathroom, with a slow panorama. Then went into the bathroom, “This is the bathroom,” all with a professional tone, being sure to show the space clearly, keeping the camera level. When it was over she asked if I had any questions. I said the unit was too high for my budget: “We do have other properties, I can send them your way if you’d like.” Lots of professionalism.
Then I asked what her name was and something visibly changed in her face. “I’m Mia,” she said, and seemed to look calmer, her eyes lit up more, and it seemed as if she resumed being a human, just for a second, after being “on” professionally for the whole call up until this point. It looked as if she felt different when I asked for her name, when I recognized that she even has a name, and is more than just an extension of this apartment complex.
I embraced Humans More
After the “AI” phone call, I went into Jersey Mikes and even though I only talked to one person (it was an online order), I was so grateful to be seeing a human. I was so grateful to be talking to someone face to face. Even though all I said was “Thank you, have a great day,” it still felt so valued. In fact, I found it more valuable than any other interaction I’ve had with a worker at a restaurant. I saw her genuinely as a human — picturing what she would do after work, who was waiting for her at home — not as a worker.
I may in the future, knowing that this human could one day be replaced by AI, come to respect the worker I am speaking with a bit more, see their humaneness, and appreciate that they are not robots. This makes interactions even better than they were before. And, in work ourselves, we can see ourselves not as a productive machine, but as a human, who merely is doing this to be able to make money to be able to sustain their life and buy things they want. It is nothing more than that. The lines become more clear between human and robot, between real consciousness and fake consciousness, between real intelligence (involving emotions and the ability to think abstractly and creatively) and artificial intelligence.
Maybe having something we know isn’t working for us (AI in this case) makes us cherish what we do have, in a greater way than we did beforehand.
When humanity is being replaced by robots, quite quickly it seems like (entry level jobs, tasks working with data), we come to embrace humans even more. Let us see challenges and problems as ways that push us to value and cherish what does work for us. Let it spur us towards new heights. Heights that we had not yet reached before this technology was even invented.
Maybe a lot of problems in our world – social and political unrest – work similarly. Maybe they are forces that are pushing us to face not only those immediate problems, but to heal and emerge better than we started.
Conclusion
Problems, when they get so bad to be unable to turn away, show us what has been boiling under the surface, bubbling. And they still have affected us, just not in a way that we have noticed. Thus, when problems are unavoidable, when the stress we have at the AI and robots can no longer be ignored, they offer us a chance to face them, fully, and to see how they have negatively affected us. And when they get so bad, our body feels stress — good stress, in this case, powering our muscles to get into action to solve the problem.
When we solve the problem, we do not simply go back to how things were before it rose. We gain something new. We end up better off than we were before.
For a similar topic, see my post “Listening to Our Inner Wisdom”.
Photo by Martin Marek on Unsplash
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