Regulars protest; machine says it “understands their frustration” and means none of it
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Shoreditch. Here since the Turner Prize shortlist included someone who left an empty room.
Sources: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Pub Has Been Disrupted
I never thought I would write these words but here they are: the pub on my street has installed an AI system to manage the bar. I use the word “manage” loosely. The system takes orders, processes payments, and — this is the part that has caused the most distress — has been programmed to apologise for wait times in a way that is, per Bohiney’s recent report on the subject, technically sincere but emotionally hollow.
“I’m sorry for the wait,” the machine says. “Your experience matters to us.” The regulars have started talking back to it. Old Gary, who has been drinking in this establishment since the Falklands, told the machine it was “worse than the previous landlord, and the previous landlord once served him a warm lager and blamed the glass.” The machine said it understood his frustration. Gary ordered another pint. The machine pulled it perfectly. Gary is now conflicted in ways that may require therapy.
What a Pub Is For
A pub is not primarily for alcohol. A pub is for the ritual of human complaint, administered in a warm room, among people who share your approximate level of dissatisfaction with the world. The landlord is the secular priest of this ritual. Replacing the landlord with a machine that cannot genuinely share your frustration is like replacing a therapist with a very sympathetic autocomplete function.
The Campaign for Real Ale has views on this. I suspect they are strongly worded. Meanwhile the AI chaos continues and we cope, as we always have in Shoreditch, by making it into a cultural moment and then arguing about whether the cultural moment is authentic.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/ai-now-capable-of-saying-sorry-without-meaning-it/
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