Old Man Yells at The Cloud

The guillotine will never be replaced

“I'm angry at numbers. There's too many of ‘em, ‘n stuff.”

—Beavis

I've worked in the information technology field for four decades, and used computers for six. I'm no technophobe, but I find myself becoming increasingly cranky with tech in the last five years.

In particular:

Self checkout lanes.

QR code menus and drink lists.

Predictive text, and phone virtual keyboards.

The utter uselessness of web search engines.

The lack of human moderation on everything from map navigation to digital media.

That's off the top of my head. I'm sure you can think of more. I decided to write about it because my younger friend Johnny, also an I.T. professional, has similar complaints about some apps. The quality control is lacking, and there’s less competition. He was aggravated by his phone’s virtual keyboard as well, so it wasn’t my big clumsy sausage fingers with a problem.

At first I avoided self checkout to save jobs. Then they reduced staff and made that inconvenient or impossible. Then they saw an increase in pilferage and made the process more annoying with cameras and alerts and warnings. Now some chains are doing away with it. Thank goodness.

Next up should be the QR code instead of a menu. We don't want to look at our phones. We are going out to eat a prepared meal, and hopefully talk with humans. Maybe Gen Z prefers this but they have student loans and no money. Us old people hate it and are lousy with filthy lucre. The kids don't eat out, they use door dash, when they should use dine and dash, and fight the system by robbing you blind.

At the airport they have self service kiosks that fail and are so confusing that they need staff to show you how to use it. They actually make you lift your luggage onto the conveyor now. I guess that makes you suffer for packing your bags to the weight limit. The rental car had a terrible info screen. I couldn’t figure out how to adjust the climate control. Were dials that difficult?

With robots and AI, the jobs that kill humans still aren't being replaced because in the United States, human life is cheaper than robots. The USA still uses asbestos in manufacturing despite worker deaths. Other countries ban it, but Republicans have decided that workers are expendable if it means reduced profits. Nothing new there.

The Hollywood strikes were partially to stop replacing writers and actors with AI and digital facsimiles. Disney has already replaced dead talent with computer generated graphics in Star Wars and there's certainly more to come. They don't want to pay for new ideas, and if they can remake everything using unpaid talent they will. Disney has been cutting animators as well.

Bill Gates of all people said that automation and AI should be taking the tough jobs that reduce our lifespans and give humanity a 3 day work week. That's utopian talk from early in the previous century, once thought less profitable, and therefore impossible. Gates was the focus of an antitrust lawsuit a while back because his Windows OS tried to make you use their crappy Internet Explorer browser. Now, Google makes you use their web search and frankly, it sucks now. It’s a page of ads and their Assistant on Android phones shunts you to YouTube for everything, which is laden with unskippable ads unless you subscribe to their premium service. And even then, you still get some ads. Now they are banning ad blockers and making YouTube webpages pause for 5 seconds if you don’t use their Chrome browser to view it. Google Maps errors that have been reported for years have resulted in numerous deaths, as drivers are sent down trails to nowhere and in one case, over a collapsed bridge. It was during a rainstorm, and the road was not maintained, but people reported the problem to Google for years without any response.

They need to be broken up like Ma Bell was. Before that, you couldn’t legally use an answering machine because Bell didn’t allow third party devices on their phone system. The split wasn’t perfect; did you ever get “slammed” and have your long distance provider changed without your consent, back in the day? But breaking monopolies and making them compete is the only reason they have to innovate for our benefit. Their embrace of AI is not for our benefit, it is for theirs.