The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

D^HLying is easy, it's comedy that's hard...

This is doomerism. Yes, everything will get worse. But everything will also get better. Such is progress. (for every one of these examples of annoyances, I can think of two ways to use AI to get around the annoyance. not clever programmer things, but things an average person who learns to use Codex or Claude Desktop to operate their desktop will know)

Most of these annoyances are also things that existed before AI, and will continue to exist after, because consumerist capitalism. The good little obedient consumers get abused because they don't stand up for themselves. Customer service is an enfuriating maze? Yeah, because you voted with your dollars (and political indifference) to allow companies to make customer service (the thing you pay for) worse. We bring these problems on ourselves. It's pointless to complain if you aren't willing to do anything to change it. (And if you think you can't change it, there's other nations to look at, as well as the fact that you live in a democracy - for now - unlike the rest of the world)

Hell, we already have companies whose sole purpose is to manage your subscriptions for you because you're too lazy to do it yourself. You could look at this and say, man, the world is terrible! Or you could look at this and say, man, how great is my life that I can not only subscribe to a lot of things without going bankrupt, but I have extra cash left over to pay a company to manage my subscriptions?

Don't let the hedonic treadmill and complacency trick you into A) accepting a worse life, or B) convincing yourself your life is bad when it's actually better than most people's.

Everything that is old is new again.

Payment processing, is better than it was in 2000, but still not good.

Micropayments: this is obnoxiously expensive to do.

Discovery, and discoverability: again here we have better but not good solutions (and many of the ones that were once good are enshitified).

Pricing: this is a problem everywhere, and frankly we need the law to change in a way that is pro consumer. Publishing prices, disclosure of fees, in both services and for payment processing (that 3 percent back from visa looks a lot less attractive when it's part of a 5 percent mark up).

Customer service: well there are already companies promoting models where they cut you off and send you into a black hole (google is a prime example). Good customer service will become a differentiator, and maybe a "paid for" service as well.

> ML models will hurt innocent people.

Lots of blaming LLMs but I think the root cause lies elsewhere, I’m not even sure whether dismissing it as “capitalism” or “profit motives” would do it justice, because in general it feels more like the world that we live in lacks humanity.

Even in a capitalist world, a company could take a stance and decide not to purposefully screw people over, but in the world that we live in instead they look for ways to better screw over people and extract more money from them. It doesn’t matter whether your customer support is handled by someone from India, a crappy telephone tree or some voice model, when the incentive is the same - to do the bare minimum for customer “support” (in practice, just getting you to fuck off). Same for handling insurance claims and “dynamic pricing” of things - it doesn’t matter whether it’s some proprietary algorithm or just an LLM making crap up when the goal is to screw you over.

Blaming “AI” for all of this would be barking up the wrong tree (without that tech they’d just find other ways), though one can definitely acknowledge that this technology provides another convenient scapegoat, same as how you can lay employees off and just say cause it’s because of AI when in actuality it’s just greed and wanting to make your books look better.