Race to the Bottom - Chatbots, Boeing, Kids, and Sexting
Chatbots
If you worked in marketing some time between 2013 and 2020, you were probably exposed to the 'martech' revolution (a portmanteau of Marketing Technology, ugh.) As opensource got better and cloud computing got cheaper, some marketing functions that used to require expensive custom software solutions were now accessible via SaaS companies. One of the original martech companies, Hubspot, went public in 2014 and, a decade later, has caught Google's interest as an acquisition target. There is a joke that even the people who work at Salesforce can't describe what it does, but a lot of what it does is martech.
I could bore you with the many flavors of martech, but suffice it to say there are many, many software companies out there that will swiftly automate away lots of the tedious, unpleasant tasks involving finding new or getting in touch with existing customers. Which, on sum, is a good thing! No one should be forced to sift through thousands of rows on a spreadsheet and copy/paste bill reminders or advertising pleas to potential buyers.
Another thing martech sought to revolutionize was customer service - chatbots! You may recall when we started seeing interactive icons appear on websites in the mid-2010s, sometimes springing to life to annoyingly inquire whether you need help with anything. You may also remember when you started encountering them as fake 'agents' at your cable company or bank, feeding you canned responses until you typed FUCK OFF enough times that you triggered a transfer to an actual human.
These pre-historic bots ran on coded decision trees, helpfully illustrated by this image from a site called Chatbots Life:
The author also provides a succinct overview of what chatbots were good for in the olden days (2018):
It turns out that even in the fairly straight-forward problem of ordering pizza, chatbots are not the omnicompetent gods that were promised.
What Chatbots can do however is support customer service. If a customer starts his journey off by asking simple questions, chatbots can provide simple answers.
Right, yes. The original purpose of the martech chatbot was to allow a customer to do simple things on a website, via a series of straightforward prompts like 'would you like to do X, Y, or Z' where X, Y, or Z were the only acceptable answers. And, for things like ordering food or getting answers to simple questions about a product, they were a decent solution.
Obviously, we are exploring the history of chatbots to provide context for just how out of control modern 'AI' chatbots have become. The latest high profile incident concerns New York City's chatbot which has been advising users to break city laws:
The chatbot remained online on Thursday and was still sometimes giving wrong answers. It said store owners were free to go cashless, apparently oblivious to the city council's 2020 law banning stores from refusing to accept cash. It still thinks the city's minimum wage is $15 per hour, though it was raised to $16 as of 2024.
Users on social media spent a few giddy days prompting all sorts of creative nonsense from the bot, which the city's lawbreaking mayor continues to defend for some reason.
Last month Air Canada was held legally liable for its chatbot misapplying a discount for a customer:
"It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website," read tribunal member Christopher Rivers' written response. "It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot."
Right! One reason companies like Air Canada and cities like New York have rushed to put these half-baked bots on their websites is that they're being encouraged to do so by Microsoft, Google and their peers, desperate to prove commercial need.
The problem is that, unlike when you hired a group of engineers to code in hundreds or thousands of possible responses on a decision tree to provide basic customer service, Microsoft tells its clients that it can 'train' its chatbot on their existing datasets, and voila! Except, obviously, that's not how it works at all.
What makes this all the more frustrating is that chatbots as customer service is not even remotely new technology, and for years martech companies poured resources into giving them basic - if sometimes maddening - functionality. Now AI has come along and some of the world's biggest tech firms who should absolutely know better are birthing poorly trained, wildly inaccurate bots into the world, incapable of performing basic tasks we solved for a decade ago.
Boeing
There is a macro story of the ongoing downfall of Boeing, which charts a path from the company's ill-fated merger with McDonnell Douglas through a series of psychotic CEOs who prioritized shareholder returns over quality and safety considerations. It is, ironically, the same story that saw GE - whose CEO many Boeing executives sought to emulate - broken up and sold for parts after those tactics led to its ruin.
There is Boeing the company, which abused its suppliers, busted its unions, and sold off anything that wasn't nailed down to a web of contractors it also abused and exploited. Like so many of these stories, Boeing embraced corporate greed and malfeasance so openly, and was rewarded so richly for it by markets, that it's easy to overlook how its actions impacted tens of thousands of its employees unfortunate enough to be caught in the wake.
That is why it is worth reading this account of John Barnett and his Boeing colleagues, by the excellent journalist Maureen Tkacik. Normally I would pepper you with damning quotes, each more enraging than the last, but in this case I think the narrative is worth consuming in its entirety. Go ahead and read it, I'll wait.
There is something so venal, yet so personal in the actions of Boeing's executives during their decades-long effort to purge the company of its most talented and, not coincidentally, most outspoken engineers and workers. It is a struggle we see playing out all across the country right now, an aggrieved managerial class so convinced they are beyond reproach that they coin snarky nicknames for entire classes of their workers, in Boeing's case the literal people keeping planes from falling out of the sky.
I cannot fathom the kind of brain required to make secret blacklists of line managers who dare call attention to major manufacturing flaws on your assembly lines. Or whatever rattles inside the head of the CFO of one of the world's two major airline manufacturers whilst informing the press they kept those lines running whether or not the planes had the correct parts attached.
The simplest answer is that they don't believe they will ever be held meaningfully accountable for their immoral and probably illegal actions, and for the entirety of Boeing's existence they've been absolutely right. I am not sure what amount of money deactivates a person's conscience, whether the $3.9 million dollar pension one Boeing CEO received after ten years' service immunizes him from stories of planes designed or built on his watch killing hundreds.
The question now is - can Boeing be saved? Will installing another senior executive from a group so proudly rotten to the core make any difference, even with scrutiny from regulators? Boeing's leadership proved more than capable of evading both oversight and punishment for decades, as the quality of their planes degraded precipitously, and hundreds of people died in preventable accidents.
Even if they were to miraculously improve their standards overnight, the cascading scandals and failures have put production so far behind airlines are considering furloughing pilots because they won't have planes for them to fly. While the people who giddily oversaw the looting of Boeing enjoy their pensions and retirements, the shambling corpse of a former industry titan lurches on, perhaps beyond repair.
Kids
There are few issues able to avoid conscription into the culture war in our politically broken country. It was therefore unusual to see bipartisan legislation make its way through Congress with the laudable goal of offering free meals to poor kids during summer break. It was depressingly predictable, however, that more than a dozen GOP-led states refused the money:
The new $2.5 billion program, known as Summer EBT, passed Congress with bipartisan support, and every Democratic governor will distribute the grocery cards this summer. But Republican governors are split, with 14 in, 13 out and no consensus on what constitutes conservative principle.
Their intransigence will leave 10 million children facing food insecurity. It exploits well-worn weaknesses in our federalist system - even with the best of intentions, and rare bipartisan agreement, ideologues at the state level can hold up aid and harm children to score political points with the, uh, child starvation caucus?
What about the kids? Well, our friends in the UK can serve as a cautionary tale. Last year we learned that British children growing up under the country's post-GFC austerity were shorter than their European peers. This year, Victorian illnesses are on the rise, as are parasites and infections associated with squalor and overcrowding. Cases of rickets and scurvy are up fourfold.
We've talked about the precipitous decline in average lifespan in the US, driven by deaths of despair. Our lack of social protections for the most vulnerable, especially children, could be setting us up for a increase in physical and developmental disabilities due to malnutrition because a handful of politicians oppose anything that could be perceived as a positive for their ideological opponents, or the poor.
Sexting
It is generally a good idea, when using dating apps, to not send compromising pictures of yourself. You never know who could be on the other end of a seemingly innocuous profile. It is especially not a good idea to send such pictures if you are a sitting member of Parliament in, say, the United Kingdom, also especially if you are using your real information in your dating profile.
It is super not a good idea to freak out if you receive blackmail demands as a result of said compromising pictures, and turn over the phone numbers of some of your colleagues in Parliament.
It is EXTREMELY not a good idea, if you are one of said colleagues who receives a 'flirtatious' text from an unknown number to send THEM compromising pictures of yourself, and you know what fuck it, why do I even bother:
Mr Wragg, 36, who is openly gay, told The Times: “They had compromising things on me. They wouldn’t leave me alone. They would ask for people. I gave them some numbers, not all of them. I told him to stop. He’s manipulated me and now I’ve hurt other people”.
[...]
Politico originally reported on the scandal, and on Thursday revealed that Leicestershire Police had launched an investigation. It said MPs were sent late-night texts from an unknown sender, who claimed to have met them years ago in a bar.
Soon afterwards, they were sent an explicit image and asked to reciprocate. While many were said to have blocked “Charlie”, The Times reported that two MPs did respond with an explicit image of themselves.
They may be raising short, nutritionally deficient boys in the UK these days but they certainly do not lack for horniness.
Short Cons
WaPo - "Two right-wing political operatives must pay up to $1.25 million in fines after they were found liable for launching a robocall campaign designed to keep Black New Yorkers from voting in the 2020 election, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday."
Bloomberg - "The reasons to have employees do recreational investing on their own time became clear when Scoutpads went under, leaving about 160 people who’d found real estate investments via the platform, including the dozens of Meta employees, with an estimated $50 million in losses."
WSJ - "Forbes for years ran an alternate version of its website where it packed ads that were intended to run on Forbes.com, another sign that brands don’t always get what they pay for in the opaque digital-advertising market."
The Athletic - "It’s upped the scrutiny on teams — Temple last month was investigated for betting irregularities involving its team — and the vitriol directed at players. That vitriol, of course, can be directly delivered thanks to social media."
Gizmodo - "Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped."
PressWatchers - "Instead of a probing analysis of the stakes, what Bidgood gave us in her welcoming remarks was just more of the generic political-journalist pablum about finding interesting stories and covering both sides and — yes — having fun."
Fortune - "“I think the landscape is going to change. Medicare Advantage will have less perks and be less attractive to people,” says Marvin Musick, cofounder and chief educator of Medicareschool.com and a Medicare broker."
Know someone thinking of replacing basic customer service functions with a deranged chatbot? Send them HERE!