Recently I had an experience that I suppose is becoming increasingly common. The large, publicly traded energy company that has taken control of gas and electric utilities in my region, replacing nine local companies, decided in July, for reasons best known to itself, to change the account numbers of some portion of its clientele, including me. I found out only because the balance associated with my old account number had remained zero for six weeks, which I knew could not be correct. Perhaps a notice had been sent to me and mysteriously turned into spam; I don’t know. Wishing, however, to pay my electric bill (which has doubled since 2020) before it got out of hand, I attempted to find out the secret of my new account number. Clicking on Help (as a rule, admittedly, a useless exercise), I was directed to a list of FAQs, none of which was germane to my question. I then tried the company’s chat and was picked up by a chatbot that was not programmed to answer my question. Despite the purported miracles of artificial intelligence, it kept referring me to the FAQs I had already consulted.
I girded my loins and attempted to contact a human being at the company by means of its customer service line. After listening to a long recorded speech about how I could apply for a payment plan if I was experiencing economic hardship, I was told that, unless it was an emergency, I needed to call during regular business hours, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Monday through Friday. Calling back at 8 a.m. on Monday, I was told there were eleven people in the queue in front of me, and my wait time was estimated at fifty-five minutes. Since I work for a living, this was hardly convenient, but I waited, multitasking all the while, and was eventually shunted to an “AI assistant” who of course did not understand my question and directed me, once again, to those all-purpose FAQs. The company was clearly doing everything it could to prevent me from speaking with a human being. All this, while reassuring me that it was “on my side.” Against whom?, I wondered.
The avoidance of human beings on the part of large companies is understandable, if not necessarily excusable or advisable as a social practice. AI no doubt saves corporations a lot of money in salaries and benefits, reduces their legal exposure, and can probably solve most people’s problems efficiently enough. The costs of dehumanizing—for example, making your corporation hated and feared as the faceless profit-seeking machine that it is—don’t appear on the balance sheet.
It is also the case that it’s hard to find people who can interact with the public for hour after hour and remain pleasant and helpful. Such jobs used to be outsourced to English-speakers in other countries, often India, where accents were sometimes difficult to understand. These poor individuals, as a rule, were made to speak from a script and kept under electronic surveillance. They could be fined or fired for going off-script. They were, in effect, human bots, people being used as machines. At some point, it became easier and cheaper to replace them with electronic bots trained by AI.
The jobs that remain for humans in customer service are often extremely unpleasant for those who hold them. The warning to customers before every interaction, that “this call may be recorded for quality and training purposes,” is in fact a warning that if the customer becomes stroppy or abusive during the conversation, there will be a record of his behavior. It’s depressing for employees to listen to dissatisfied people for hour after hour and have the job of giving them the mandatory response: The company will do nothing to help them. Human beings become unhappy when they are asked for help and not allowed to give it. It’s dehumanizing. Making other people miserable is no way to spend your working life. The average time people last in call centers or customer service jobs, I’ve learned, is thirteen to fourteen months. You have to be pretty desperate for work to take such a job. Customer service conducted by humans is the desperate talking to the desperate.
The few pleasant customer-service interactions I’ve had in recent years have been with people who work for the State of Massachusetts. I’m a conservative, and my default is to expect no good thing to come from the state, so this is an uncomfortable admission. But my interactions with public services personnel in the state have been friendly, helpful, and often completely unscripted. I’ve even exchanged gardening and travel tips with some state employees, complete strangers before my call. The reason state employees—apart from the famously hostile personnel of the Registry of Motor Vehicles—have the time and freedom to be friendly and helpful is obvious on reflection. Massachusetts is a one-party state, which means that state employees have excellent job security and benefits, and nobody cares much about the bottom line. The job of state employees is to give out as many benefits as they can, and the more they hand out, the more successful their department is held to be. They may even get bonuses for exemplary service in spending the state’s revenue.
The downsides are the famous trinity of “fraud, waste, and abuse”—the ease with which money strays into private pockets when such vast amounts are moving through the system. And of course we pay very high taxes in Massachusetts, relative to other states. There are a few journalists left who are willing to expose the waste and criminal behavior of state officials, and the Feds have learned to keep a close eye on the state. Every speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives between 1991 and 2009 was convicted of a serious financial felony. The president of our state senate for eighteen years was the younger brother of a well-known mobster, with whom he communicated illegally when the latter was on the lam. The Feds could never catch the older brother, but one could be forgiven for suspecting corruption when the younger brother, a convicted felon, won $14.3 million in the state lottery. The probability that this could happen by chance was several decimal points to the right of zero. But perhaps a certain amount of corruption is the price of preserving humane interactions between citizens and the state.
It’s not an option that corporations have, under competitive conditions. Or so they say. “They” in this case are the usual suspects, the defenders of “our capitalist system” (as though it belonged to us), who believe that dehumanizing the economy is the inevitable and irresistible outcome of the AI revolution. And it is a good outcome, because it will make us all richer in the end. We may be reduced to cogs, obeying the machines programmed to control us—but GDP will be higher!
On the left, too, we always hear that one must be on “the right side of history,” that more and more power in the hands of the state, more and more creative destruction of moral norms, is simply inevitable. (It’s strange, isn’t it, how the people trying to cancel our history are the same people who want us to be on its “right side.”) All we can do is cooperate with history and get out of the way of the future. The future will require a more powerful and “interventionist” (the progressive word for “tyrannical”) government, aided by information technology, to suppress and silence all the enemies of progress. And that is good too, because the future is where we will all be happy.
Progressives and the defenders of capitalism have odd views about what makes human beings happy. For the right, happiness seems to mean wealthy people having still more money, whereas for the left it seems to mean politicians, on the advice of “experts,” imposing still more regimentation on their fellow citizens. Beliefs such as these are taught by no philosophy, religion, or wisdom tradition. The ancient philosophers, East and West, taught that happy communities are built on virtue, trust, and friendship, all of which entail real relationships among real human beings. Judaism teaches that happiness is a reward for doing good, loving and caring for others, and performing deeds of kindness in the community. Early Christianity taught that the basis of a blessed community life is love of one’s neighbor and mutual support among the faithful. Classical Islamic law teaches that building a happy society, blessed by God, requires that all believers practice charity and support the poor. Confucian teaching on what makes communities happy emphasizes personal virtue, which requires the development of one’s full humanity, the observance of common rituals that promote harmony within the community and with nature, and compassion for others, in an ever-widening circle from family, to community, to the state, to all mankind.
As far as I know, no entrepreneur has yet developed a happiness-producing bot that can replace the collective wisdom of humanity. AI, in fact, is taking us rapidly in the opposite direction. Human societies now seem to be caught in a technological meat grinder that is forcing our humanity out of us. It is no wonder that the younger generation, which has no memory of the more humane societies of the past, is becoming more and more miserable, according to some recent surveys. They are addicted to numerous online “communities” that bring them anxiety and isolation rather than happiness. We are being told all the time that these technological developments are inevitable and irresistible, part of the march of progress and science. In the rhetoric of progress that has long dominated the West, the advance of science always makes us happier. If you are unhappy, don’t believe your lying soul. Trust “the science.”
Most of the wisdom traditions of the world teach, however, that humans have free will, in some form or other, and can make themselves and their societies happier through reason, goodwill, and the observance of ancient custom. Continuity with the past gives meaning to life and is a source of happiness. Enlightenment prejudice has trained current generations to dismiss such traditions as outdated. But has traditional wisdom regarding happiness really been replaced by scientific expertise? I don’t know of studies that prove that it has (as if such a thing could be proven).
We need to resist the rhetoric of scientific progress and not allow ourselves to be herded into a miserable future by “elites”—that is, persons whose elite status comes from their skill at making money and seeking power. There still exists a free market of ideas and work (not to be confused with “capitalism”). Our power-hungry betters, try as they might, have so far not entirely taken away our capacity to learn and work independently of their direction. We can still start businesses and schools that are free of their interference. There are still many people who yearn for a normal society in which humans serve each other face to face and form lasting relationships of mutual care and love. There are still many people who understand that this is the way to happiness.
I have only one suggestion as to how such a society might be rebuilt, a society that can resist the trend to techno-tyranny. People who realize that techno-tyranny is making them miserable can demand businesses of a different type. I can imagine a movement for human-to-human businesses, small banks, stores, and service providers that promise their customers “H2H”—that would make a nice logo, wouldn’t it? A bank or an insurance company that would promise that phone calls will be answered by human beings. A barbershop that would not be deserted except for the one barber whose one client booked the appointment online. A café that would have a cell-phone-free zone where people can meet and talk with neighbors. A clinic that would not shunt its clients automatically into tele-medicine. A hardware store that would have a person you know and trust to give honest advice about buying tools and materials.
The consultants will say that such businesses can never hold their own in a competitive market with more efficient and therefore cheaper providers. But is that right? Economists speak of “emotional salary,” when job satisfaction and a happy working environment compensate for a low salary. “Emotional salary” can prevent workers from departing for higher-paid but more stressful jobs. Doesn’t the same economic logic apply to consumers? Doesn’t some significant portion of the population prefer dealing with human beings to dealing with bots? In my own town I know of loyal customers who go to a more expensive barbershop because it’s a cheerful place with lively banter between the barbers and their clients, though a shop a few streets away offers haircuts that cost nine dollars less.
People, in other words, will pay for happiness. People are happy when they can make other people happy, and be paid to do it. Maybe you can buy happiness after all, or at least buy from businesses that increase your happiness, rather than leaving you angry and frustrated. Isn’t that what money is for?
James Hankins is a professor of history at Harvard University.
