Rise of the Machines

Tarot card artwork by the innovative, unusual Scott Lefton: Visual & Material Art

I sent my friend Levi an email message a couple of days ago and forgot about it. Then, today, I got an email message that it hadn't made it through. This new message, from my computer, said, "I was unable to deliver this message. I won't try again; it has been in the queue too long." This was a total surprise to me. Not only was I not aware that my computer had been working for the last 24 hours straight to get Levi my message, but I had no idea that it had been working so hard and become so frustrated with this task, with my message, with me, that now it was refusing to even try one more time. I was riveted. I half feared it might dump all my MP3 files into my recycle bin and break up with me.

I'm not sure when this movement started, but I'm noticing that our machines are starting to emerge with their own identities. They're speaking in the first person. My ATM machine used to give general message such as, "To make another transaction, hit enter." Now it says, "Can I help you with another transaction?" But the spookiest one ever was in the NW. I won't say what bank, but it all but asked me how my cats are doing. "Please give me your pin number before we go any farther." I had the creepiest feeling that this machine was watching every move I made, and that it might ask me if I'd brought any coupons for the grocery store, since it knew I'd be going there next and we were overdrawn the last time.

I used a picture machine in Wal Mart today, the kind that runs a simple photo editing program to make prints from pictures and fix things like cropping and red-eye. It had remained an inconspicuous machine throughout the project, until I was finishing up. Then it rose out of anonymity and tried to make conversation with me. "What a good picture. That turned out great. A nice frame might make it even better." I froze. Another unmarked instance of this insidious rise of the machines. I looked around. Wasn't anybody else panicked about this? I've seen the movies; I know how the revolution of AI starts. You think it's coincidence that so many software programs use the image of an eyeball in their logo? It's just a matter of time which one of us blinks first.

I don't know what bothers me more - that somewhere, marketers are trying to make machines more human, or that these ideal customer sales scripts are trying to turn the human salesmen into machines. I've always been big on politeness, but these relentless "please, thank you" and "would you like to"s are unnerving me. The marketers can't trust the humans to execute such stylized, consistent script, and if they can't convert the real world, then they can convert something even more real - the virtual world. Soon, we'll all be lulled into the ultra-polite, ultra-consistent dialogue of customer sales. We'll know, on some deep level, that the last bastion of civility lies in the digital underpinnings of commerce. And when we need a conversation, to be noticed and spoken to directly, to be recognized as the living, breathing individuals that we are, we'll know who to turn to - the machines.

That is, unless the machines decide that they're not going to try again, because we've been in the queue too long.

by Kat Ricker