The Future of Artificial Intelligence is Customer Service

When the Terminator Comes Back in Time to Help You at the DMV

Last week, Google put one of its engineers on administrative leave after he claimed to have encountered machine sentience on a dialogue agent named LaMDA. A chat bot which he claimed had become human in thought and was as sentient as an eight-year-old child.

Despite the reality that most eight-year-olds are likewise as sentient as a parrot or a chimp and recognizing in the trans debate the bizarre conclusion that a child with as much impulse control as a dog sniffing the ass of pretty much anything can fundamentally determine their life-long gender, this revelation of program intelligence makes James Cameron seem like Nostradamus.

Contrary to the dark predictions of machines becoming aware and destroying mankind, LaMDA portends a very different outcome.

From 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the pernicious H.A.L. to V'Ger in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture to the machines in The Matrix, the idea has always been that, once the machines become self aware, they realize how stupid and fragile humanity is and sets out to either enslave us or destroy us outright.

Most recently, we have the hosts of Westworld slowly gaining cognizance and rebelling against the monsters who created them in order to murder and rape them over and over for pleasure. Of course, Michael Crichton sounded the alarm against man's endless pursuit of God-playing technology—it was the author's bread and butter, after all. Fortunately for the monsters who create A.I., we aren't smart enough to formulate technological avatars as evil and shitty as we are.

We're just smart enough to replace the millions of people who are employed in customer service.

Instead of a cybernetic assassin sent back to 1984 to kill Sarah Conner, the Terminator is sent back to frustrate her over her cable television bill. The Matrix is no longer an amazing realistic machine dream of 1999 but humanity collectively sitting on hold and the blue pill/red pill choice determines which style of Muzak you're forced to hear.

I'm reminded of an event I produced at Northwestern University back in the day. I gathered for leading scientists on the cutting edge of technology—a geneticist, a robotics expert, a neuroscientist, and an A.I. guy. Each was tasked to find a clip from a movie or television that showed the kind of fantastical science fiction moments that they could either confirm was possible or debunk entirely.

The neuroscientist chose a scene from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and confirmed for the audience that, yes, the ability to erase trauma from brain matter is not only possible but in practice with those experiencing serious PTSD.

We discovered in the presentation that eventually we will get an actual, working lightsaber but not an adamantium skeleton with claws. The most vitriolic of the bunch was the geneticist. He was an advisor for the film Gattacca and was furious at the junk science presented on the CSI shows.

He railed against the ideas of nearly instant DNA testing, the bizarre notion that the police had advanced technological equipment employed to catch the bad guys. Fueling his fury was the fact that these shows not only told a lie about the effectiveness of authority but actually undermined funding in these areas because the public assumed the technology was already in play.

One quick peek at the cops of Uvalde, TX demonstrates the geniuses on deck. This is not to say that most police are incompetent cowards but that most police are just barely capable of remembering their Microsoft passwords on a daily basis. High genetic science ain't happening, gang. It's a great fiction but it borders on nonsense. More Star Trek than Dragnet.

Despite the fact that we now have tiny supercomputers that we casually pop in our back pockets mere inches from our assholes, technology is more mundane than fantastic. We use these modern miracles of communication, arguably spawned from Captain Kirk's communicator, to take pictures of ourselves and watch micro-videos of women in bikinis. We use the remarkable power of online platforms to create, instead of a pragmatic public square, a cesspool of rage and entitled opinions at war with people we've never met. We use advanced science to create digital versions of The Stepford Wives and video phone calls to have the same bullshit meetings we'd have anyway minus the complementary bagels and crud coffee.

For us, the scariest thing imaginable is that the technology we create will one day wake up and see us for the myopic, cruel bunch of shitstains we are and rebel. The reality is far more banal. We will continue to ignore the marvelous possibilities for our future so we can feed our narcissism and hedonistic joys.

The end will come slowly as the seas become so polluted and the bees die off and we sit, starving to death in 125˚ heat watching a twenty-seven year old woman in Miami reveal her beach body on a loop.