The age of unabashed AI has arrived
Companies like Delta and Microsoft now brag about ripping off their customers and discarding employees
Almost 30 years ago, my friend K Waterman said to me, “I’m noticing something strange. The airline is giving me a different price depending on whether I’m logged in or not.”
I was skeptical until I ran tested the hypothesis with my usual airline, American. It was true. This was the 1990s. Of course, we didn’t call it AI back then. It was (and still is) just a change in their algorithm. K predicted it would get worse, and then ubiquitous. She was right.
Still, it was a shock to read this today:
Rising consumer demand for travel is one reason Delta’s CEO is feeling more optimistic, but the company also has another trick up its sleeve.
It appears to be aiming to maximize revenue by charging each consumer the highest price they are likely to pay.
To be sure, it’s nothing new for companies to withhold their best deals from their best customers. I can confess to a certain anger when I used to see what the magazine industry calls a “blow-in card” with a price on an annual subscription that was one-fourth of what I was paying. “Hey New Yorker, I’ve been a subscriber since the 80s, don’t you want to give me a better deal than someone who has never subscribed?”
Or the cable provider with a $99/month deal. “Hey, Spectrum, here’s the thing. I could cancel, and then restart six months a day later, and get this great offer, and the only difference is, you’re out six months of revenue between now and then. Why don’t you just give me the deal now?”
(That conversation isn’t hypothetical — I’ve had it thrice in my lifetime. It worked once, and not the other two times. On the two occasions, I wasn’t bluffing — I went, in the parlance, “over-the-top,” meaning I used a hodgepodge of subscriptions and services to make up for the lack of cable. The first time, it was early enough in the phenomenon that the magazine I wrote for published an article about it.)
Still, there’s a difference here. Back in the day, companies had a modicum of sense, or at least a sense of shame, in what they were doing to their best customers. Here, Delta is literally bragging about screwing them.
Why would they do that? I certainly can’t look into the heart of an apparently heartless corporation, but I can speculate. I think they’re doing it because they’re not talking to us; they’re talking to the market in general and their shareholders in particular. It’s no accident that we first learned of this in an earnings call.
There’s a saying in tech — it comes up in the context of free services, like Google search, email, and maps, Facebook and Instagram, and so on — that if you’re not being charged for something, then you’re not the customer, you’re the product. (By the way, it seems the first version of this saying was in the context of television, and it was apparently said by none other than the visionary sculptor Richard Serra!)
In the era of extreme capitalism, apparently you can be the customer — even the best customer — and also be treated like you’re the product. For the shareholders, you are.
In related news (or at least, I think of it as related),
A Microsoft executive has made a bold — if dubious — claim: that the company has already saved hundreds of millions of dollars as it automates thousands of jobs formerly held by humans.
Again, in a way, this isn’t news. On at least two occasions, I have heard Bill Gates, while he was still head of Microsoft, talk about automating the lower levels of programming. (The first was at PC Expo, a big computer and technology event that used to be held in New York City. Memorably, Gates shared a stage with the head of IBM at the time, Lou Gerstner. Bill came out in a button-down-shirt and slacks, i.e., IBM-wear, and Lou came out in a polo shirt and khakis, i.e., startup-wear.)
But again, that was prediction, not bragging. It hardly matters if the claim today is dubious. Even if it isn’t true, it’s just a matter of time before it is. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much if it happened yesterday or a few years hence.
And from my point of view, what’s striking is the braggadocio. Gates, when he spoke of it, at least managed to appear to be sorry for the thousands of good-paying white-collar jobs that he was working so diligently to automate out of existence. (Note that Microsoft’s current layoffs aren’t limited to software engineering; it’s also using AI in sales and customer service.)
In the world of extreme capitalism, where shareholder value is the only value to be cherished, this exploitation of customers and employees is a feature, not a bug. And the only question is, when will we, the bugs, say enough is enough? We didn’t object when millions of blue-collar jobs were automated out of existence. Will we draw a line in the sand now? Will we ever?