For a few weeks I’ve been receiving this email from Google:
My first question is why is birth control an issue. Is Google limiting the advertisement of birth control? Why? Did we somehow slipped into the 19th century and nobody told me?
My second question was… how could they think I have anything to do with birth control. I guess that was nothing more than AI failing miserably, so, I decided to go and fix it. The important caveat here is that I haven’t run any ads in months, maybe more than a year.
I click the Fix button and and it took me to a black page with the “Unknown Business” title. There was no way to text support, so, when the emails got annoying enough, I called them.
The support guy was nice, but he couldn’t do much about it. I explained that I wasn’t running any ads and I didn’t plan on running any for now, but maybe in the future. He told me to ignore the emails. I asked if there was a way to stop them and he told me to search for an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. That’s not what I meant, I want to fix the problem. All right, that was enough time on the phone, I’ll just ignore the emails.
Now is when it got weirder. The support guy said that his supervisor was there and wanted to talk to me. Ok… Click! Someone else starts speaking:
Supervisor: Hello Hos (their way of pronouncing José), did so-and-so answer your query today?
I’m always careful here. He didn’t solve the problem but I’m sure it wasn’t his fault. Most of the times I have an issue, it’s their system being broken and a support specialist shouldn’t be punished for that.
Me: Sort-of…
And as I was trying to explain the situation, the supervisor interrupt me:
Supervisor: Ok then. If you have any other questions, feel free to call us between 9 am and 5 pm.
Click! Hung up. Wow… that was rude… and odd. And now I’m thinking, did I just talk to Duplex and it failed at managing my answer?
When it comes to technology such as Duplex, my take is this: it’s going to happen no matter what, fighting it is futile, let’s try to figure out how to make the most out of it. But I have to admit having interacted with what I suspect was Duplex gives me an odd feeling (even if it was it). It makes me want to rebel, it makes me want to test it the next time I call to try to figure out if it’s a human or not. This is obviously useless; the only thing that matters is getting my issue resolved. What concerns me here is that if a technology-loving person such as myself is getting this strong reaction, how will the general population react?
I think we are going to have some interesting growing pains in the next couple of decades.
