In other words, how they pretend they’re human.
Like they take a human name.
They take the pronoun I.
They call you by your first name.
And act like they know you in a sham-effort to make you believe they are listening and even caring.
These are the tactics of scam artists.
Of three-card-monte dealers.
Of flim-flam men.
Of the charlatan-in-chief.
I’ll admit, I have an alexa.
I’ll ask it the weather.
When I do, I want to know just a few things.
1. The temperature.
2. The humidity.
3. Is it sunny or cloudy?
4. Will there be rain?
5. Anything unusual—like high-winds or raining frogs.
Instead, alexa pretends to be human.
It starts every answer with a faux human interjection and even faux-er touches of ham-handed humanity.
“Well, it’s a beautiful day, George,” it’ll answer.
It fails to give me what I want.
Instead it gives me what it wants—which is a sales spiel.
Such is the GDD* of modern death by technology.
(*GDD= General Deception Disorder.)
But something even worse is happening all around us. It’s so omni-present we don’t even see it or notice it.
As machines pretend to be more and more human,
humans are acting more and more like machines.
We are trading places.
The trade will result in the fundamental last ding-dong of doom for many people.
Semiotically and semantically, machines no longer work for us,
we work for machines.
That’s what the language—and the technocracy of the altman-musk-ellison class--is telling us.
We work for machines.
We are owned by their machines for their profits.
(I promise you, when the great tech crash—and the societal meltdown that will accompany it arrives in the next six to twelve months—that crash will be blamed on runaway algorithms and self-governing machines, not the so-called humans who gave them their power.)
Here are three examples of humans talking like machines.
If you ask someone to tell you their thoughts on a deep topic or something of importance, you’re apt to hear them reply, “I’m still processing that.”
Machines and Cuisinarts process.
Humans think.
Or used to.
If you say something like, “My feet got wet in the rain.”
You’ll likely get “one-hundred percent,” as a reply.
“Yes,” was so much more human.
But now we spreadsheetize simple feelings.
Finally, last week the so-called advertising trade-press, this was a big story.
If you have any desire at all to retain any human-ness at all, I’d ask you not to process this, but instead to think about it.
1. “Omnicom…”
I’m sorry. Omnicom is a corporate contrivance. It didn’t do anything. The people who run omnicom did something.
2. “offloads…” Again, containers on giant ships or garbage on trucks are off-loaded. Humans don’t offload.
I baby-sat my 17 month grandson yesterday. When it was time for his nap I didn’t say, “I off-loaded him to a crib.” Semantically, offload seems as nazi-fascist as “liquidate.”
3. “hundreds of staffers…” Try hundreds of “people.” With a people-like sphere of meaning. Like lovers, children, mortgages, and the need to eat. Laying off staffers masks the pain you’ve caused and the hardship.
4. "AI platform...” I don’t know what a platform is in this context. AI is lines of code. A platform is a physical structure upon which people can stand and build. There’s none of that here.
5. "third-party contractor…” That’s how people use legal-jargon to say, “subsidiary that removes omnicom from responsibility.”
Finally, there’s the dreadful illustration.
Which semiotically places the disembodied omnicom appendage into a god-like level. Wisdom, strength, power flows from that hand.
That’s what they want us to “process.”
The corporation and the tech is god.
We are dust.
We were only following orders.
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