Say What You Want About AI: It Has Never Sighed at Me

The discourse has spoken: AI is a menace. It hallucinates. It makes things up with the serene confidence of a man explaining your own job to you. It will tell you, cheerfully and incorrectly, that there are no “r”s in “strawberry.” That’s fine. It’s all good. I’m not here to defend the machine’s relationship with the truth.

I’m here to remind you what we’re comparing it to.

Because before the robots, if you had a question about a computer, you had to ask a person. A person who knew the answer. And as most have probably experienced at the office, the amount a human being knows about computers is directly, mathematically proportional to how insufferable they are about it.

You remember. You called the help desk. You waited on hold long enough to learn the saxophone. And when a human finally picked up, the first thing they did, before “hello,” before anything, was sigh. That sigh. The sigh that said I cannot believe they let you operate a keyboard. The sigh of a person who has decided, in the first half-second, that you are the dumbest person they will speak to today, and possibly ever.

Then: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Yes. Obviously. I tried that before I surrendered forty irreplaceable minutes to your hold music, you absolute…

“Hm. It’s working fine on my end.”

Cool. Cool cool cool. It’s working fine on your end. Truly the four most useful words in the English language. Let me just relocate my entire life to your end, then. I’ll pack a bag.

And God help you if you asked your question online. You’d post in a forum, politely, with screenshots, and within nine minutes some person named xXkernel_daddyXx would reply: “This has been answered already.” Where? WHERE has it been answered? He links a thread from 2009 about a different operating system that has since been discontinued. The thread is locked. The man who answered it is presumably dead. “Marked as duplicate.” Thank you. Thank you so much. I’ll just stay broken, then. I’ll live like this.

A crowd favorite, the response that wasn’t an answer at all but a referendum on my character: “Why would you even want to do that?” I don’t know, man. Because I want to. Because I am a free adult in a free country and I would like my printer to print. Is that permitted? Do I need to file paperwork with you, the self-appointed Sheriff of Reasonable Computer Usage?

This was the world. For decades, this was the only world. If you didn’t know something, you had to lower yourself before a priesthood of guys who treated basic knowledge like a state secret and your ignorance like a moral failing. And here is the thing I have made my peace with: it was never really about computers. Hand anyone a little expertise and a captive audience and watch what happens. They didn’t set out to humiliate you. They wanted to be witnessed knowing things. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. The fixing was incidental. The audience was the point.

Now. Let’s talk about the robot.

The robot does not sigh. Not unless you want it to. I have asked the robot the same question four times in a row. Rephrased slightly each time, because I didn’t understand the answer. And the robot, bless its little silicon heart, answered all four times like it was the first. With patience. With enthusiasm, even. Try that with a human. Try asking IT the same thing twice. They start cc’ing your manager.

The robot does not say “this has been answered already.” The robot does not link a dead thread (it does sometimes, but you can ask it to try again and it kindly will). The robot does not ask why I would even want to do that (unless you ask it to). I tell it I want to do a profoundly stupid thing, and it says, essentially, “Love that for you. Here’s how.” No notes. No judgment. No referendum on my character.

It is 3 a.m. and I have a question that would embarrass a fifth-grader, and there is no human alive I could ask without leaving my body. But the robot? The robot doesn’t know it’s 3 a.m. In fact, sometimes it’s noon and it’ll tell you to go to sleep because “you’ve done enough for today.” The robot doesn’t care that the question is stupid. The robot has never once, not for a single millisecond, made me feel like an idiot.

Does it lie? Sometimes. Yes. It will look me dead in the eye and invent a citation, an author, and a page number for a book that does not exist. That’s a real flaw and I won’t pretend otherwise. But here’s the part nobody panicking about AI seems to remember: the humans lied too. “It’s working fine on my end” was a lie. “That’s impossible” was a lie. The difference is that the robot lies while trying to help me, and the help desk lied while trying to get rid of me.

And here is the part that brings me, I won’t lie, a small joy I am not proud of.

Have you noticed who complains the loudest about AI? It’s them. The office IT guys. The very priesthood. They’re all over the internet now, clutching their keyboards: “Ugh, it’s so annoying. It acts so stupid. It doesn’t understand what I’m asking. I explain it five times and it still gets it wrong.”

I’m sorry. I need to sit down. This is too serendipitous.

You’re describing a thing that doesn’t understand you, makes you repeat yourself, and plays dumb no matter how clearly you spell it out? Buddy. Buddy. That is not a bug report. That is a memoir. That is precisely, to the syllable, how you people have made the rest of us feel since the invention of the floppy disk. The condescension is coming from inside the house now, and I notice you do not care for it.

Welcome to the club. No dues, no hazing. We’ve been members for thirty years, and we saved you a seat. It’s right next to the printer that still won’t connect.

So forgive me if I can’t fully join the moral panic. I grew up in the era of the Sigh. I did my time on hold. I have been Marked as Duplicate. And I’m telling you, as a survivor of the before times:

The robot’s real trick was never being smart. Plenty of people are smart. Its trick is being the first expert I’ve ever met with no ego to feed. It does not need me to feel small so it can feel tall.

A machine that’s sometimes wrong but never smug is not a downgrade from the smartest person in the room who could never quite resist letting you know it.

It’s the upgrade we’ve been begging for. It just doesn’t have a face to sigh at us with.

I’m here for it.