My wife was gone for a week long conference a few weeks ago. I was flying solo with the three youngest, the nine-year old, three-year old and the nine-month old. The older four are either grown and gone or at college. The baby is growing up quickly. Baby food and bottles are giving way to bits of the meals we are all having. Yet, he is still on the verge of popping those first teeth. In this particular landscape of child development, there seems to be a great deal of fluid involved. With all seven of our children, I’ve always been amazed what teething does to babies. Nasty diapers, ear infections, extreme drooling, irritability, chest congestion and sleeplessness are all on the menu. Well, after three relatively sleepless nights, I decided he might be developing an ear infection. Upon conferring with my wife, it was my job to contact the doctor and get an appointment for the little guy.
I decided to get ahead of the phone-call rush family practice staff members usually have as soon as their offices open. Information I had because my wife has worked in a doctor’s office in her own nursing career. I reached out to the number on Google and called around 6am. As expected, I got the call center and not the office. I would get a message in with my number on record and hopefully be in the queue for a call-back as my own morning was developing. I navigated through the prompts until finally the phone rang through and someone answered. At least I thought it was a someone.
I’ve had my share of jobs dealing with the public on the phone and I am pretty good at customer service. The courtesy, responsiveness and tact of the receiver of my call was perfect. Absolutely flawless. For the first two thirds of the call, I was trying to figure out what was happening. Was this a person? Why were the answers so generic and scripted? It could’ve been a person, there were keyboard clacks in the background. But there was something subtly not human about the voice on the other end, something unreal about the consistency and regularity of the keystrokes I was hearing.
No sighs, no stutters, no click of gum being chewed or background office noise, no sniffles or sign of impediment. And then I realized the exact problem. There was no sign of impediment. No struggle or difficulty in the receiver of my call, no taking a beat to think while making sense of an office schedule. There were no points where the voice and I went to talk at the same time and accidentally talked over the other. The program on the other end was doing it’s job flawlessly, and worse, I was following along the whole time, wanting to return the politeness and respond as expected.
I had heard that AI operators were beholden to tell you their system ID and function when asked, “Are you AI?” But I couldn’t do that. The risk of being wrong was too great. Two things. First, if it wasn’t AI and this was a person who’d worked really hard to just be a great operator, I would be embarrassed and maybe offend the potential person on the other end. Second, what’s the big deal, right? It’s just another system in place to make life easier and save the health care system money. Why couldn’t I just use the system, get in line for a call back and go on my way? I’ve now been thinking for weeks why the whole interaction bothered me.
The efficiency and capability of AI in general along with employed AI systems are predicted to do one of two things. The final stage of AI development has the possibility of becoming gods over us. Or, AI’s growth will not outgrow the bounds human beings have placed around it and in the end AI will help us in our quest to become gods ourselves. According to the Bible, human beings desire to supplant God while being unable to match Almighty God in any way. We are like Him, for sure, as we are made in His image. But only in the same way that a statue of my dog is not really my dog. We are statues that long to be the model from which our design is taken. I wonder if AI will be the same. Will a fully self-aware AI then decide to overthrow the image bearers who made it? Or will AI give more glory to a creature who’s pursuit of glory tends to know no boundary itself?
In the end, the AI operator I encountered caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting it, was initially taken in by it and felt shaken by my indecision to confront the possibility while on the phone. I guess I like my human interaction, well, human. It’s unnerving to me that a machine can pose as human more perfectly than a human can.