Bill Schubart: Will Artificial Intelligence Make Life Better or Just Make Business More Profitable?

I struggle with the concept of artificial intelligence, perhaps because in my 77 years I have had to deal with intelligence that I can perceive and distill from teachers, friends, art, science, and the natural world.

I had to consider and process these inputs, place them in context, and classify what is true and valuable and what is not.

Technology, like a hand tool, is supposed to make life easier. But if the energy required to learn and use the tool exceeds the energy saved by using it, it’s not a useful tool, as I mentioned in a previous column.

The explosion of AI software that tries to satisfy our natural human need for help and advice is said to save industry billions, but has, so far, done little for humans seeking answers.

Will AI make the world a better place or just make business more profitable? When implementing AI, will companies prioritize human and customer needs or company politics and profit?

The company I co-founded and ran for 25 years provided a local call center service to major broadcasters and various publishers. At our peak, we employed 80 agents who were fully trained on our customers’ products. Our goal was to answer all calls by the third ring and we largely achieved that. An agent might respond, “Thanks for calling The History Channel; How can I help you?” Agents knew customers’ product lines intimately and had screen support for all product inquiries.

We sold the company in 2008 to a private equity firm that proceeded to cut costs, moved the call center to Southeast Asia, where agents answered calls from dozens of other companies, and attempted to implement primitive AI. The deterioration in customer service was so marked that customers began to leave en masse and the company and its 175 jobs disappeared within a few years.

Have you ever called the toll-free help line from QuickBooks, Adobe, your bank, the IRS, Medicare, or any of the myriad other services we’re relying on more and more? Studies show that 15% of customers hang up after waiting 40 seconds. When a customer manages to complain to a company about their product or service, does that information ever reach the decision makers?

Remember when you could call a travel agent and receive a reservation from Burlington to Iceland and vice versa and receive your travel details. Now, you need to work directly with the airline or a travel aggregator, good luck with that.

A persistent airline customer tested a company’s phone line after being on hold for two hours. He decided to wait and see how long the business would keep him on the line. About 15 hours later, the call finally went through and he was notified that his original request (which put him on hold in the first place) had been denied due to an error.

My own record to date is waiting 47 minutes for a human to respond to the Quicken Helpline in the Philippines. We then talked for another 128 minutes after I gave him online access to my computer, and he finally acknowledged that the system was having “problems” and that he should call back later.

It turned out that I lost the ability to process 22 years of financial records. Luckily, I had backed up the data.

To apply to American universities, our trilingual and fully literate Serbian foreign exchange student, Mina, who earned A’s at Champlain Valley Union High School in her senior year, needed to take a standardized test administered online to determine her fluency in English.

The first effort failed due to a scheduling mix-up regarding the Euromilitary time standard versus American time.

The second effort, which started half an hour earlier, was on his home computer. It required extensive rewiring. He passed the technical test and then, minutes before starting, he was instructed to download an extension. After the download completed, and when the test started, the extension created ambiguities on the screen. He was told that if the extension caused a problem, he should click the “help” icon. There was no help icon. We were unable to resolve the technical issue, so Mina was taken offline from the site.

We set up the third test at CVU in their computer lab with the help of a technician on staff. Mina arrived an hour early. They resolved the myriad of technical issues, including having to move to another site in the school, and she began the trial. She completed the first half and was told to take a 10-minute break. She did, came back and started again, but the test site told her that she couldn’t complete the test because she had taken her cell phone into the bathroom (to text me that the test was working).

They denied him access to the second part and he called me crying. So, after three tests and charges for each, he was unable to access the test required of all exchange students who wish to apply to an American university: the loss of our country.

I recently went to a restaurant that had no menu. I had to get the Wi-Fi password from the waitress, enter it into my cell phone, scan a QR code, and read a linear menu listing my lunch options and prices. I will never go back there. Maybe I’m just old.

Going to Canada to pick up my wife at the airport, I filled out the ArriveCan online check-in form, a prerequisite for any traveler to Canada now. I filled it out with all my personal details and then he asked me for a credit card. I was surprised at the charge, but carelessly inserted my Amex card. That failed. So, I entered a Visa card. Then I got an email saying my payments hadn’t gone through and an agent would be in touch within 72 hours. Planning to be in Canada in 60 hours, I replied that I needed help before then.

The reply came from Russia and both cards had been torn up. I canceled both and went to Canada without credit cards. The fake site perfectly mirrored the legitimate Canadian one, just adding the card capture.

I am one of the early adopters. I wrote my first novel on a briefcase-sized laptop 35 years ago. But I am concerned about the aging of our population, among which I count myself. Many now lack access to the once common human help (“navigators”, I believe we call them). How does a person of Medicare or Social Security age navigate on their own the myriad complexities of using systems essentially designed to minimize staffing costs?

Thanks to our local telephone company, we have fiber optic cable to our house. But we know many Vermonters who still have dial-up access.

If health care continues its migration to telemedicine, helplines go unanswered and emergency room waits grow longer, what will happen to the many whose lifelong access to medicine has been through a local primary care physician? How many people will just give up? At a certain age, the energy and perhaps the ability to relearn how to tackle all of life’s tasks fades.

Artificial intelligence shows promise in many areas, but if it is designed solely to remove the human costs of commercial enterprise and collect personal data to re-market for profit, it will not serve humanity well.

AI should be designed with people (consumers) in mind and with the knowledge that information technology can be designed to help or exploit, depending on how it is implemented.

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