When No Human Is There to Help...

After a recent big update on my computer, I logged on to find my extended monitor was no longer connected. I grumbled, but I wasn’t worried. I’ve had this monitor for ten years and I’ve learned how to fix it: go to the Microsoft site and download the drivers. Voila! All back to normal.

So I did the usual. But it didn’t work. I tried a couple of other maneuvers, and they didn’t work either. Pretty soon I was out of options. So I thought, Time to call Microsoft.

You probably know where I’m going with this. In fact, I hadn’t called Microsoft in some time. I was about to find out how different things are now.

To back up for a minute… when the monitor was young and I didn’t know how to fix it when it disconnected, I always called Microsoft support. (Before that, I went to the local Microsoft store—which of course hasn’t been there for years—and brought my computer and had them look at it.)

Even after my computer was out of warranty, I could call online support for issues related to their updates. They would ask a few questions, and then they would take remote control of the computer and quickly solve whatever was wrong.

This week, faced with a problem I couldn’t solve, my first thought was that I needed a human. So I called. And I waited. And waited. And waited. For the life of me, I could not reach a human.

After three of four hours, I decided to see if I could reach a sales person instead. And I did! In the entire episode, which lasted about eight hours, she was the only human I talk to. To be clear, most of the time we were only texting. Her name was Lexi, and it occurred to me after a while that maybe she wasn’t human. (Does Lexi sound like a bot?) But then she suggested calling me and trying to connect me with a tech person.

So she called. It took her a very long time to reach a tech person, but eventually she got through. I was on the line with the tech person for five seconds before the call dropped. So I went back to texting with Lexi. She called me again and tried to contact another tech person. As soon as she did, that call dropped. At that point, she said she was sorry and she couldn’t help me.

Lexi suggested I continue to try calling on my own. But I quickly found that when I called the Microsoft number, it immediately disconnected me because I had made “too many attempts in 24 hours.”

That was the freakout moment: I’m living in a world where THERE IS NO HUMAN TO HELP!

Since the system that supposed to provide humans had failed me, I decided to try ChatGPT. I mean, what else to do?

And honestly, talking to ChatGPT was more of a “human” experience than what I’d just been through. Chat bumbled along for a while—not making any major errors, but not solving the problem either. At least there was dialogue. At least there was attention to the problem.

Eventually I came up with the idea of reversing one of the updates. Chat agreed that was worth a try (though it hadn’t thought to suggest it). I did that, and OMG, it worked!

I had lost the better part of a day’s work. But why am I taking the time to write about this? Because as frustrating as it was, it was also illuminating. This isn’t news, but it was a firsthand experience of the absolute trash that online technical support has become. Nothing against the individual humans working there, but the entire system is so atrociously bad that as far as I’m concerned, those humans don’t get any credit.

AI is actually doing a better job—and this coming from someone who rants and raves about how AI is leading us down the wrong path.

For AI not to lead us down the wrong path, we humans had better create and preserve and maintain a better path. Otherwise AI will win by default.

I did a little bit of follow-up afterwards because I realized my monitor does have signs of aging, even if that wasn’t the cause of the decoupling incident. In the process, I chatted with a human sales person at HP. There was never an option to speak with them by phone. It’s easy to see how it’s just a matter of time before they will all be replaced by AI.

It wasn’t a fun day. I came away with a deeper realization of how AI is already running our world. And the scariest part? Much of the time we don’t even realize it.

Photo: kalhh/Pixabay