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by lostlogin 406 days ago
I agree. And then I recall my last few interactions with insurance companies.

Dealing with a machine is unlikely to be worse.

4 comments

My knee-jerk reaction is to think that the prospect of an insurance company handing support over to machines is a terrible development.

But it was already the case that they just arbitrarily do WTF ever they want, that outside a small set of actions that "bots" can perhaps handle fine they aren't going to do anything for you, and that the only way to get actual support for a real problem involves something being sent from a .gov email address or on frightening letterhead.

So... not really any different? You already basically have to threaten them (well, have someone scarier than you threaten them) to get any real support, this wouldn't be different.

>and that the only way to get actual support for a real problem involves something being sent from a .gov email address or on frightening letterhead.

What you really mean is that the only way to get them to honor their deal is credible threat of violence.

There might be a million intermediary steps spread across just as many parties but that's what it is at the end of the day.

>the only way to get actual support for a real problem involves something being sent from a .gov email address or on frightening letterhead.

And then the they will add a low cost arbitration clause, where disputes are also handled by AI. Free market goes brrr

My last few interactions with an insurance company were moderately annoying but far from terrible - I would absolutely loathe having those replaced by a machine, given the terrible quality of every AI "assistant" I've ever used.
Similarly, I was just forced to talk to an insurance company and the only way I got any response was by talking to a human. The more robotic they are, instead of working around known issues, the more likely we are to get to a satisfactory solution (e.g. don't overcharge me and then do nothing about it).
Right. I wouldn't say that my interactions with those people were great, but they weren't nearly as bad as any of the automated systems that I've used.

Also, I think you may have made a typo that negated the meaning of some of your comment (but I believe I can understand what you meant anyway).

While a human interaction can be awful, there's a special hellishness that is trying to negotiate with a robot to get something related to your healthcare taken care of.
It seems to me apparent that there needs to be some way to arbiter the claims outside the insurer company itself. I'm... not sure that there is. But if there were and there exists some sort of sanction or incentive for the insurer to get it right the first time... I'm confident that AI insurance companies could streamline the process. But you need this incentive mechanism, else it's a recipe for dystopia. (Deeper thought goes that you would shift a lot of work to the arbiter, but I won't touch that for now.)