Japan chain uses AI to gauge staff smiles, speech tones in QoS push

I wish people wouldn’t talk confidently about things they’re so clueless about.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajsp.12322

One of the things you learn pretty quickly in business is that people (including you) are astoundingly parochial. They/you view the world, to some extent, only through the eyes of the world they live in.

And if you're a manager, the world you live in is one of trying to maximize the performance of your employees. You don't think of this as exploiting them or refusing to consider their needs. You think of it as making sure you're doing your job.

The people who are doing this probably don't think of it in terms of an employee who's having a hard day being docked 0.78 Positivity Points for an Insufficiently Enthusiastic Greeting. They think of it as detecting when an employee isn't doing their job, which is their job. Thinking otherwise requires actively modeling other people, often people who are unlike you, people who might differ from you in a status hierarchy or that you might view as not having been as successful as you. And keep in mind that if you're a manager, you do encounter people who aren't doing their job all the time. It's not a surprising thing to encounter.

For better or worse, smiling at cusotmers is a meaningful part of a service job. Look at almost any review list for a retail establishment or restaurant, and service is going to show up in a lot of them. Maybe if customer preferences changed, it wouldn't be, but it's not like companies get to decide what their customers do or don't want.

And with that mindset, you can see how you'd get to the point of boasting about it. "Look how well I'm doing my job," you say. "I'm going to make sure we're delivering exactly what customers want by finding a clever new use of technology. Sure, some people won't like it, but what are they saying? That I shouldn't ask my employees to do their job?"

*None of this is meant to defend the idea. What they're doing is horribly dystopian.*

But if we want to actually fight that dystopia, we need to understand where it comes from, and it's not people going "hooray I can abuse my workers even more!". A few people at the top who are particularly clear-minded about things might think that, but most people don't. Managers want to sleep at night, too. Instead, it's people saying "hooray, I did my job, a thing that is important to my well-being and identity, really well today!".

The term "banality of evil" applies here, but it's worse than banality. It's the way in which banal evil satisfies very real and wholesome human needs. Some guy woke up in 1943 Germany, went to his train-engineering job, worked really hard all day to be the best darn train engineer he could possibly be because he loved doing it more than anything else in the world, and went home and went to bed deeply satisfied next to his loving wife. It's that guy we gotta figure out.

Being polite often IS emotional work, even for neurotypical people operating within normal environments. The nature of customer service is that you are dealing with the general public and expected to not tell them "sir, you're a raving lunatic" with any particular regularity (despite the fact that a pretty substantial portion of the population are in fact raving lunatics).

Even non-service jobs regularly involve emotional labor just to maintain good relationships with your colleagues, because some emotional labor is involved in almost any collective endeavor of human beings.

Using smart tech to do stupid stuff. We have millions of years of developing our social interactions to know when someone is fake.