‘Artificial Intelligence’ was 2016's fake news “Fake news” vexed the media classes greatly in 2016, but the tech world perfected the art long ago. With “the internet” no longer a credible vehicle for Silicon Valley’s wild fantasies and intellectual bullying of other industries – the internet clearly isn’t working for people – “AI” has taken its place. Almost everything you …
It's been fixed, thanks. Our production desk has been light in the run up to Christmas and New Year's Eve due to illness, people taking time off and paternity leave. We're gradually getting back up to speed.
Having said that, I disagree that our editing has dropped like a stone: we're doing our best against operations like the NYT and WSJ that have armies of editors and still screw up. You're welcome to email corrections@theregister.co.uk if you spot anything wrong. The volume of mail to that address is reassuringly light. When it gets a flood of messages, we know we've screwed up.
C.
...a media willing itself into a mind of a three year old child, in order to be impressed.
A bit of pattern recognition technology (ref: Great to see. @Alan Bourke) and a suitable digitised form gets the BBC a new Technology Correspondent.
Or, have they done that already?
Andrew, you might not want to let the SJWs see the line, "Put it this way. How many times have you rung a call center recently and wished that you’d spoken to someone even more thick, or rendered by processes even more incapable of resolving the dispute, than the minimum wage of offshore staffer who you actually spoke with?". It rather suggests that all offshore workers are thick. BTW, we call it a 'centre' here in the UK.
In Andrew's defence, statistically I would agree with his statement. This is probably a side effect of promoting people into level 2 support as soon as they turn out to have more braincells firing than originally assessed by HR (which is IMHO the blind leading the blind, but that's another discussion).
I would not say that all support workers are thick, only that an annoyingly large portion of them seem to be able to give that impression. Could be process, could be braaaainz (sorry, too many Zombie movies over the holidays), but the net result is that contact centres manage to stubbornly cling on to their reputation as the worst possible, most unhelpful and user unfriendly customer interface possible.
That does need fixing IMHO - Andrew is right in that that is a route to lose customers through that do not just leave, but also prevent others from filling up the churn hole by dissing your reputation. On the flip side, in my experience in the more value added services you can also win customers by being intelligent in solving problems, but that does require an investment that especially volume based industries simply will not make. I guess you get what you pay for..
Replace "thick" with "ignorant" or even "untrained" and the comment is no longer inoffensive. It certainly doesn't brand all offshore workers as anything, just the ones selected (or condemned) to first-line support. Since HR are *probably* trying to steer the more clued-up (and therefore more valuable) staff into second-line support, this shouldn't surprise anyone.
Btw, I'm sure Andrew is aware of how we spell things over here but we've been spelling them correctly for 150 years and yet Mr Webster's idiotic nationalistic experiment hasn't gone away over there. Maybe in 2017 they'll finally notice that (to pick but one obvious example) no native speaker *anywhere* *ever* has ever pronounced the two vowel sounds in "color" in the same way and so Mr Webster wasn't even right by his own standards.
"Isn't it a bit early in the year to restart the English vs American debate?". No it's way too late, the majority of Europeans who emigrated to the USA never stopped over in Britain to learn "proper" English. Just get over it, nobody controls a language, it evolves where ever the wind blows and this is so true when considering the history of the English language. And with no intention to hurt, too deeply, anybody, the Americans have been able to, fairly well, get rid of the inbuilt British feature of class/school/village background identification still embedded in British. Nothing of value lost there. A bit surprised though about the quality of the English teachers sent to India. But please get over it, it's not your fault in the first place. English become important in the rest of Europe only after WWII and only because of the Americans and the fact it become the language of science pushing German and French aside.
A teacher once asked me why I like English, my response was that I like it because there is no grammar. He wasn't all that amused, a teacher after all, but with no command of any other language he had nothing to compare with. Then again try "by" at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/by
And, by the way, note the icon.
@Lars: And, by the way, note the icon
Where? :)
Nah, I was just gently poking some fun. I prefer UK English, but you won't hear me yell "sacrilege!" when someone uses US vernacular - my mother tongue isn't English so I get to poke fun at both and then watch the fight from the sidelines :).
I like English because it's a language you can really play with, proven by an almost endless stream of comedy one-liners and play on words that it easily facilitates (the key reason why legal English is so dreadful). Sadly we have allowed politicians to pollute that glory with political correctness and euphemisms, a trend we really ought to fight with everything we've got.
If we can get back to calling a spade a spade we may even be able to get rid of a lot of the BS out there, in both languages.
"and the comment is no longer inoffensive" - When I was growing up we just said, "makes pigshit look like water" ... there, that's fixed it.
On the whole, I generally chose language and actions that are not "offensive" but we're going to have to make some adjustments to everyone's attitude - vis-à-vis the blatant unchallenged lies in recent US election and Brexit.
Frankly, "offensive" isn't nice - but it exists for a reason.
The lack of training is entirely intentional -- first-level call center workers are expected to work off scripts and conversation trees, because it makes it easier to replace them when they quit. And they do quit, quite often, because the hours are long, the pay is low, the schedules are unpredictable, and there are no scheduled absences allowed. Have to take a few hours off to go to the doctor? Better have another job lined up before you pull the trigger on that, because you won't have one afterwards.
I think a lot of the problem with the increasing marketing BS about AI is down to the fact that early nerd millionaires suddenly realised that although they could create valuable IT stuff, they knew very little about how to sell it.
Then they began to employ marketing guys who helped to make the millionaires into billionaires, that entrenched marketing into the game and once marketeers have too much power everything is sold like washing powder; every year or so there is a new incarnation of a product that is usually not that different but is sold as 'New Improved, Washes Whiter Than White And Removes All your Understains better Than Before' ( Many of these campaigns are planned for years at a time with staggered so called improvements being introduced bit by bit).
So each year there needs to be a new buzzword or innovation in order to have a new bandwagon to help the consumerist hype along. At the moment it's AI until as Andrew says, everybody gets sick of it when they realise it's not intelligent, smart or even a benefit.
Dragon speech to text has been going for donkey's years and is touted as smart but I know for a fact it can't process the speech from two of my friends, one is a Glaswegian and the other a Geordie, mind you I have a few difficulties processing some of the things they say.
So each year there needs to be a new buzzword or innovation in order to have a new bandwagon to help the consumerist hype along. At the moment it's AI until as Andrew says, everybody gets sick of it when they realise it's not intelligent, smart or even a benefit.
Isn't that the same routine that pulls the modern art trolley? I honestly cannot see any other reason that someone pays a lot of money for a scaled up model of the sardine tin (shark in a tank) or something I have prior art (ha!) of, an unmade bed. IMHO it rather damages the creation of actual art.
That's exactly how contemporary art works, Damien Hirst and Tracy Emmins are out of the same stable, the people that run it were interested in a friend of mine. The deal was, he had to suspend all activity at promoting himself, clear any new art with them first and basically put his entire life in their hands for two or three years and they would make him as big, he declined, being too much of his own man.
The two above were mercilessly marketed and I know from what my brother tells me that Hirst does little to no work on his art projects which are carried out by workers. My brother lives close to him in Ilfracombe. Just another type of marketing.
> Dragon speech to text has been going for donkey's years
Hell I saw it in action in the early 90's. It was running on a large PowerPC box, was dog slow and didn't get all that much right.
There sure has been advances since then in these "mechanistic processes", one cannot deny that.
90 out of 100 "helpful" suggestions by any software or SmartThingy are neither helpful nor close to what I actually want.
9 out of 100 "helpful" suggestions by any software or SmartThingy are totally neither helpful nor remotely close to what I actually want.
And whatever is promoted as AI these days won't make things better.
"In a healthy and competitive services marketplace, bad service means lost business."
After years of racing to the bottom I don't think we have healthy and competitive market places in anything that involves customer service. The result isn't so much lost business as churn and as long as the cost of that is less than the cost of providing decent customer service it's what we're coing to get in the future.
AI has been with us a long time - first of all we had ELIZA, a psychotherapist, then along came Clippy - who folks never really appreciated - and now it has become Herr Chatbotty.
AI is evolving, is started off as a single celled, string substitution algorithm and now, after 30 years, it is breathing air at low tide as a matter of necessity. Once it evolves limbs life will improve ... it will be able to craw away from its shit.
DO WHAT ???
Eliza most emphatically was NOT AI. That was the whole point of it. All it did was reflect back at you what you said to it, and POOF!!! everyone thought they were talking to a very understanding Real Person (tm). It had no learning capabilities whatsoever, which absolutely has to be one attribute of intelligence.
BBC Interviewer: The sixth member of the Discovery crew was not concerned about the problems of hibernation, for he was the latest result in machine intelligence: The H.-A.-L. 9000 computer, which can reproduce, though some experts still prefer to use the word mimic, most of the activities of the human brain, and with incalculably greater speed and reliability.
Yup, let's party like it's 1999 1968.
A recent experience with customer support over at Sony left me with this thought: "If somebody replaced this person with an AI, would I be able to tell the difference?".
The answers I got to my support query was "we cannot resolve this question by e-mail, please phone us" and (when I eventually picked up the phone) "sorry, we do not know how to do that".
Perfect accent, so no foreigners involved. Or maybe the staff has already been replaced by AI. I can't tell. If they haven't been replaced by AI yet, then I would like to assert that even the weakest Artificial Intelligence beats No Intelligence. The bar has been set really low over the years.
Meanwhile, I notice my dad's new vacuum cleaner moves around the rooms in an erratic fashion, gets stuck, etc... More AI would be a welcome addition there.
"If somebody replaced this person with an AI, would I be able to tell the difference?"
Some years ago after my then ISP's previously excellent CS had been outsourced I decided I couldn't tell whether I was dealing with a bot or people. If the latter they'd failed the Turing test.
How many times have you rung a call center recently and wished that you’d spoken to someone even more thick, or rendered by processes even more incapable of resolving the dispute, than the minimum wage of offshore staffer who you actually spoke with?
None, but many a time I've wished they'd just let me access whatever intranet site the call centre people use. It'd be a thousand times cheaper than the shiny new voice recognition thing (sorry, AI) that will be installed and ten times more useful than phoning the call centre.
"AI" is whatever would have seemed like magic last year.
Once it actually works it stops being "AI" and gets called something else. Pattern matching algorithm, massive statistical database, whatever.
As for support call centres, if things just worked in the first place we wouldn't need so much of them. The cheaper it gets to provide call centres, the worse the products/services will be.
The cheaper it gets to provide call centres, the worse the products/services will be.
I can well believe that. What a deeply unsettling thought with which to begin the year!
Time was, companies would pride themselves on the excellence of their products and services, and it was those who excelled that were successful.
Because actual AI is still pretty far away, and whatever jobs the current embryonic AI has replaced has obsoleted have probably been offset by all the people working on actual AI.
If you are talking about automation in general, then the job losses are tens of millions each year worldwide, with the real possibility that could go to hundreds of millions per year in 5-10 years.
We have had automation since 1880s and pretty clever stuff by 1930s. You want to see old movies of almost entirely automated valve production (tubes in USA). Not computerised, but automated machines winding the grids, melting and sealing the button base etc.
Anything high volume and repetitive was automated nearly 80 years ago. The difference is than now (apart from ASICs) that production runs can be very small. The FPGA (a mass produced IC) for runs too small for custom chip.
3D printing isn't replacing mass production, and won't, it's making prototyping, mould making, concept work all faster and cheaper.
The last major industry to be much affected by automation was maybe newspaper production? I'm not sure. It's small changes now. It may impact publishing if a bookshop can do in house POD of one copy for $3, but the mass market would still be volume 25 cent per copy printing.
"It may impact publishing if a bookshop can do in house POD of one copy for $3, but the mass market would still be volume 25 cent per copy printing."
It's not a matter of bookshops doing PoD, it's PoD displacing bookshops.
There are also cash flow and technical/editorial issues involved in volume printing.
My local history group produces books every year or two. Forecasting print runs is a nightmare. A large print run is cheaper per copy but requires a larger upfront cost which we have to try to extract from our parent society and the consequences of getting it wrong linger with us. We have one book which has quite a substantial stock left years after it was printed but others have sold out within weeks. When we do local history fairs we'd be able to sell quite a few copies of the latter if we still had them but what we actually have are all too often the slow sellers.
I've been trying to persuade them to take the PDFs of the sold out books and make them available for PoD. We could get a few books run off to keep a stock for fairs and also sell online*. We could still do this at a price within shouting distance of the unit costs of our normal print run without having the society's funds tied up in stock.
If we did the entire operation PoD we'd be free of page restrictions - the way that current production works constrains the page numbers to multiples of how many A5 pages fit onto what ever the the size of the stock the printers use which may mean omitting material to meet the constraints.
However this is automation and vastly different to AI.
*Yes, we could sell online now and "all" that would involve would be setting up a website. Unfortunately that's another long running discussion with the parent society. Handing over to a PoD firm would take that off our hands along with all the other aspects of order fulfilment and also provide the cost advantage of local printing vs postage for overseas sales.
I think what worries people is that now it's not just manufacturing jobs -- the supposedly "safe" service jobs are now coming up for replacement by machines. All the reassurances that we'd be fine if we didn't make anything because we could just convert to a service-sector economy are ringing hollow.
AI, like everything else so far this decade, is simply about making money than improving the world.
Nothing that utilises AI works, it's as simple as that. AI doesn't even exist.
Until the world stops looking at ways to just make more money, and start working on ways to fix/improve the world, we're just going to get more Alexa devices, touted as the Next Big Thing®.
So it reports what they intend to save. How successful it is, including customer satisfaction, remains to be seen.
One remark in the linked article (mentioning other applications) should give them pause for thought: "incidentally, a large benefit of the software is understanding when customers get frustrated with automated systems."
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