AI. Artificial Incompetence.

I wrote this story in 2015. I never published it. I randomly stumbled across it recently and thought I’d post it because its surprisingly relevant for something I wrote almost a decade ago.

AI. Artificial Incompetence

A little while ago there was this man who rang up to complain about his delivery….at least I think it was a complaint. He seemed quite annoyed because his voice got really loud and I had to turn the volume down.

Thing is though: I’m still not quite sure what the problem was. He was really quite incoherent, but…well…okay, look; I’ll show you the first message he sent me and let you see for yourselves.

“I needed that fucking projector for my work presentation, and your fucking delivery robots delivered it to number twenty two instead of one hundred and twenty two! And the lady that lives there doesn’t think to tell me this till a week later! My address on the website is correct! Appalling customer service! I demand a refund!”

…See what I mean? Complete gibberish, isn’t it? I recognised some of the keywords that my programming says I should look for when I get messages like this. I recognised the following keywords:

“Projector, work, presentation, twenty two, one hundred, correct, address and refund”

I tried fitting these words into a sentence I liked and it looked like this:

“I needed a projector for a work presentation and it was delivered to the correct address; one hundred and twenty two, and I would not like a refund.”

There. That sounded nice, so I wrote an email back saying thank you for taking the time to write to us and it made all of the robots at Multishop HQ very happy to know that he was satisfied with our customer service, and that we will always work to provide the most customer friendly satisfaction in the future.

He wrote this back:

“What the fuck are you talking about you stupid fucking machine?? I said YOU DELIVERED THE PARCEL TO THE WRONG HOUSE! I RECEIVED IT LATE! I WANT A REFUND YOU USELESS SHITBAGS!!! DO YOU FUCKING GET IT NOW!?!?”

Now I don’t know about you, but I really like the words “useless shitbags”. I don’t know what they mean, but I just like the way they sound. I’ve put them on my screensaver, and when I’m feeling stressed, I often chant them to myself to calm down. They sound very Zen.

“Useless….shitbags….useless….shitbags”

But what concerned me and made me realise that this was probably indeed a genuine “complaint” was that I didn’t recognise this word: “wrong”.

…Well, I sort of did. I’d seen it in my programming somewhere, but it didn’t fit alongside everything else in my head, so it confused me. Everything else in my head said that the parcel would always be delivered to the correct house, so how could it possibly be delivered to the wrong house?

What could this mean?

I asked him for more information about his issue. He replied telling me that I was an incredibly stupid fucking machine if I couldn’t figure out what the words: “YOU SENT MY PARCEL TO THE WRONG HOUSE” meant.

So I sat thinking about it for a while and tried to figure out the best way to explain the situation to the man.

In the end, I wrote this:

“Hello,

I am writing to you re: your complaint about a delivery robot.

You see; the delivery robots have a thing inside of them called a “program”. This “program” means that they are programmed to do the thing that they are programmed to do, and therefore they cannot have mistakenly delivered the parcel to the wrong house, because they are programmed to deliver it to the right house.

Are you sure that you don’t live at number twenty two instead and got lost on the way home?

Kind Regards,

Multishop Complaint-Bot”

There, that makes sense, doesn’t it? What a silly man! He got lost on the way home!

That was when he phoned me up and yelled at me for a bit.

I kept telling him that programs can’t fail because they are only supposed to do what they are programmed to do.

He then asked me why we even have a complaints robot at all if, as I claim, it is impossible for a robot to make a mistake.

“Hmm…” I said. “I’m not quite sure, I’ll have to get back to you, can I put you on hold?”

“OH FOR FUCK’S SAK-”

I decided that he sounded stressed, so I gave him some happy music while I put him on hold and went away and thought about his question for a while.

When I came back to tell him I’d thought of an answer (there is a complaints robot because the programmers decided to program a complaints robot) he’d hung up the phone.

“What a relief!” I thought. Now I can just completely forget about him and go and do something else instead.

So I did. I checked my emails. There were no more complaints, so I sat and stared at the front of the room for the rest of the day.

The man never ordered from us again. I guess he just didn’t need to buy any more things and was satisfied with his Multishop experience, so I added him as another satisfied customer to our end of month customer satisfaction chart.

Multishop HQ has the highest customer satisfaction rate out of all of the online retailers. It says that in all of our adverts. I like to think that it’s been the primary reason for the increase in our consumer base over the last few years.

I’m doing such good work.