Nicholas Hagaro
Nicholas Agar is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Australia and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington.
Technology
The fully automated future many companies hope for suggests a world without human workers to call for help. Nicholas Agar takes a look at ‘skimpflation’.
Remark: US National Public Radio journalist Greg Rosalsky identifies: skimp as “some kind of stealth ninja inflation”. It occurs when companies “instead of just raising prices, skimp on the goods and services they provide”. You see cutbacks when your pizza costs the same but has less cheese, when extra tomato sauce, once free, costs now, or when the moderately priced cruise you take after three years of denial has noticeably less staff than the one you took in 2019.
It’s that last manifestation of skimping – on human workers – that interests me here. One of the easiest ways for companies to charge the same for less is by: throwing off the workers who previously helped customers with complaints about a service.
If you have a long wait for help with an existing bank or telco service, you can test the company’s skimping on human employees. Try to hang up and choose the new business option. Companies that skimp on people stay alert to new customers, while cutting back on staff to help existing customers.
Great challenges for society do not wait patiently in line to give us time to adequately address the last major challenge. Today’s economic tests are taking place during a digital revolution that provides increasingly powerful tools to automate people’s work. Companies that skimp on human support staff generally rely on their automated assistants to take the burden. This experiment in running businesses with fewer people has important implications that should not be overlooked.
The significance of corporate advocacy for courtesy
Cost-cutting companies put extra pressure on the remaining human support staff. A hallmark of the long wait times for customer service are pleas for courtesy. As you wait for help from a human worker, you’ll be hearing more and more taped requests for polite treatment from emergency personnel coping with increased demand during a pandemic. The economic downturn has exacerbated this. It’s nice that companies demand respectful behavior from customers frustrated by long delays to help.
But another way to think about these pleas for courtesy is to ask how bad it must be for a telco or bank to make that plea on behalf of its staff when they could have used those precious seconds of customer time. use to current maintenance. Imagine sitting in a restaurant, having the owner come forward and, after a perfunctory greeting, begging not to take advantage of staff who have to deal with the added burden of serving food during a pandemic.
Human canaries in the mine shaft
Canaries warn miners of dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. I think these pleas for civility suggest that work in the digital economy is becoming increasingly hostile to people.
We see this in the dominant myths of today’s workplaces. Today we hear less about Marx’s myth of the coming revolution that will wipe out injustice in the workplace. Even if the revolution was endlessly postponed, it was still a story for workers to present to employers – “Beware, treating us unfairly will accelerate the revolution!”
Today’s dominant workplace myth has to do with automation. It has the opposite message for employees. Today we hear a lot about the uncertain work of Uber drivers† Uber eagerly anticipates self-driving taxis. Its founder Travis Kalanick reportedly greeted a demonstration of a driverless Google prototype in 2013 with: an excited “The moment your car gets real, I can take the guy off the front seat… that’s what I call margin expansion.”
Driverless taxis—like Marx’s revolution—seem to be indefinitely postponed. Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has made many promises about self-driving cars that outperform humans. But today the main stories seem to be: about the fatalities of drivers mistakenly relying on Tesla’s autopilot. But Musk’s missed deadlines don’t stop fully self-driving cars being an easy myth for Uber when it comes to the demand for better working conditions.
Kalanick’s eyes are fixated on a possibly near future where there are no human drivers to pay. That is definitely margin expansion. If Uber drivers complain, the company may respond with a threat to invest more to automate them. Better not complain too much!
Automate customer service
Current company advocacy for treating their employees with respect is a sign that full automation is on the way for customer service functions. The self-help systems that banks and telcos are increasingly sending disgruntled customers to are indicative of a future where you won’t have to interact with a human employee to file a complaint about how your bank is treating you. This suggests higher profits for investors. Perhaps that’s fine if we envision a future where the bank has perfectly automated customer service. But like Tesla’s autopilot, these automated systems can disappoint.
Automated systems designers refer to edge cases that don’t exactly fit into the categories engineers designed in their systems. The more miles you accumulate on your Tesla autopilot, the more likely you are to encounter a new situation that causes an accident. Your accident may not be great for you, but it’s excellent for the company. your crash generates data that Tesla used to better handle your edge case. Future drivers – and the company – will benefit.
My recent experience bringing a smartphone from Australia to Aotearoa, New Zealand gave me experience as an edge case for my telco’s automated help system. Nobody died. But I couldn’t describe my telco’s automated help system as to why I couldn’t access the internet. After a long wait, I finally reached the enthusiastic help desk staff who were equally baffled as to why re-inserting an Australian SIM card during a trip to Adelaide didn’t restore internet access seamlessly.
There is more to it than my problems accessing the internet in Australia. The fully automated future many companies hope for suggests a future where there are no human employees to petition. In my frustrating experience as a telco edge case, when I reached out to a human employee, they understood and sympathized. A future where human aid workers have followed Uber drivers to extinction is a future where you will not have access to human workers to empathize with your plight. Instead, you’re left with the mismatched categories of the company-designed automated help system. Good luck with that!