[jayd16]

20 years ago, you could consistently pick up a phone, get a dial tone, and then call a human to solve a problem.

Sure, plenty of stuff didn't work. The issue is we're not bothering to make anything that does. It's a clear cultural shift and all of this "nothing ever worked so why try" talk here is not what I remember.

We're in a stochastic era of scale where individual experiences do not matter. AI turning computers from predictable to not is in the same direction but with yet more velocity.

[cmrdporcupine]

I think you've got your time ranges wrong. Almost exactly 20 years ago I worked for a company that did dashboards for analyzing and managing call centre traffic. The most important metric wasn't "how happy customers are" or "how many calls served" it was: "how many calls did we avoid having a human agent get involved for?" The metric of success was the degree to which they could avoid using expensive human labour and get you through the automated call tree.

Companies offered such (expensive) services because they had no choice. They made every effort to divert and divest from such activities. Google and companies like them made filthy profits because they figured out the secret sauce to scaling a business without the involvement of humans, but people were trying it for literally decades with mixed results (usually enraged customers).

Stupid red tape, paperwork, and call centre frustrations were the order of the day 20-30 years ago.

[jayd16]

What part of that is inconsistent with what I said? Over a long period of time, including 20 years ago, the trajectory of cultural value has been going from consistency to usually acceptable but at least it's cheap. It wasn't started by AI but slop is the next stop.

[cmrdporcupine]

I'm saying the experience sucked back then, too. I don't see it as worse, frankly.

[jayd16]

There have always been things that sucked. The difference, in my mind, is that we now dismiss the idea quality ever existed, an impossible hypothetical.