Long thread/3
But there are whole categories of job that perform functions that corporations don't want performed, like customer service rep, jobs they've spent decades degrading to the point where the people who do them have been stripped of all power and authority and serve no function except allowing a company to claim that they have a customer service department.
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Long thread/4
Replacing these workers with an AI not only saves money by removing their wage-bill from the corporate overhead, but it can actually turn the former cost center into a profit center. That's what Air Canada discovered when they replaced their customer service workers with chatbots.
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Long thread/5
These chatbots gave bad advice to fliers that cost them money, and in every instance except one (where the aggrieved flier was so tenacious that he chased 8 weeks' worth of internal appeals at Air Canada before escalating the matter to a regulator), Air Canada got to keep the money:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/
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Long thread/6
All of this raises an obvious question: how can Air Canada (and other firms) get away with having customer service reps who are so useless they can be swapped for defective chatbots?
The answer lies in enshittification. While most people who encounter the idea of enshittification glom onto the symptoms it describes, a three-stage process by which platforms shuttle value from users to business customers to themselves, the crux of enshittification is why this decay takes place.
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Long thread/7
The answer is power: firms that enshittify must first overpower the forces that keep their enshittificatory impulses in check, like competition and regulation (these are two sides of the same coin: getting rid of competition paves the way for regulatory capture).
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Long thread/8
Over decades, Air Canada has merged with the majority of its competitors and has become so structurally important to Canada - a big, geographically dispersed country with many fly-in settlements - that regulators can't really threaten it with meaningful penalties, not without threatening Canada itself. They're too big to fail, thus too big too jail, thus too big to care.
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Long thread/9
That's how Air Canada was able to turn its customer service into such a joke that it just didn't matter, and so it didn't matter if it replaced those purely ornamental customer service reps with chatbots.
The rise and rise of overseas call-center outsourcing paved the way for AI replacement in the same way that Walmart paved the way for Amazon. Once Walmart destroyed your town center and vaporized all the businesses that served your community, why *wouldn't* you shop on Amazon?
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Cory Doctorow