They Don't Tell Us that 'Digitalisation' (Now Sold as "Hey Hi") Just Means Customers Become Unpaid Staff and Are Made Accountable
They'd try to have future generations raised by bots or dwelling in "skinnerboxes" ("Smart" "Phones") with algorithms if they could get away with it
Yesterday I wrote to my bank: "In 2000 I was already a very early adopter of online banking, but now I partly regret what became of it; it seems to be means of outsourcing labour from bank staff to the clients, both at the expense of staff and clients and at risk (accountability) to staff and clients, for neither stands to benefit from this role-passing, i.e. it’s detrimental to us all, even your own staff, whose future seems increasingly uncertain. There is no lack of manpower (there are many people out there eager to find a job), there is just a race to the bottom in terms of filling up positions (or simply deprecating them altogether)."
This kind of issue is not limited to my bank or even to banks. We're seeing the same sorts of trends in the health service (NHS), in grocery stores and so on. They tried to engage in storytelling about how technology was supposed to make life easier and would in fact make life easier. That never really happened; in practice a lot of the digitalisation - not automation - was made to work for the "elite" few. They set up skinnerboxes with Skinner interfaces for us... and then they asked us to train ourselves in them, at the expense of our time (sometimes anxiety) and at our own risk. Any mistake made would be the customers' fault, not something their staff is responsible/accountable/liable for. This is not a side effect; this is the intention.
This past Sunday I learned that a friend at the market who had an important hip operation scheduled for months already... had that operation cancelled at short notice (not his own fault). They didn't even book him for another date. He's just waiting for the NHS to let him know when he's scheduled again. Those sorts of delays are not just obnoxious; they have a health cost/human toll. I sometimes experience that myself*.
From my understanding, it's more or less the same in most countries; banks, shops and health services are deteriorating and becoming a lot less reliable. Even a booked appointment no longer means what it used to.
It's not hard for people who are themselves proficient and experienced at computing to sense that we're not advancing. Moderation online has long been outsourced to bots (now it's fashionable to say "hey hi") and the same is true for appeals/challenges. Many companies leave people on phone lines for ages (yesterday I waited for over half an hour in vain; I got nothing but a phone bill, no actual person), partly because they "optimise" for cost and are thus understaffed most of the day. They ask for "patience", but the requests for patience come from a pre-recorded voice running in a loop.
People are being conditioned to associate technology with something undesirable, at times even unbearable. █
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* There's a personal story related to this. Yesterday I wanted to book a routine blood test and for the first time they tried to have me booked in another place or some other facilities, which never happened before. I asked why and they gave no real answer. Upon insistence it turned out there was no reason to do this. They said I can have it done in-house, as usual, then they asked about weekend appointments, which seemed strange. It's peculiar enough that they would try to send people to other medical facilities; why did they suggest weekends? Then after they said they were heavily booked they suggested a date I already said would not work; upon further insistence it turned out booking on the date I wanted at the site of choice was feasible after all. It was available all along. That meant that along 4 "junctions" they tried to 'herd' or to offload me somewhere else. It really should have been straightforward. Blood tests aren't a complex procedure (this one is not even remotely urgent) and they're virtually the only thing I ever use the NHS for. For a period of time that clinic tried to do self-service with a computer and a touchscreen; it was so slow and useless that within less than a year they abandoned it altogether. Human beings are a better "interface", it's just that humans are considered "expensive".