Sometimes you get a feeling when you know something is going to happen. It could come from instinct or experience, but it is innately, inexplicably human.
We’d booked to go for a few nights in London: myself, Herself and Daughter Number Four, who is now a veteran of short city breaks. We had picked an apartment right beside Camden Town so we could wander around the markets and take pictures of punks, and I could bore them with stories about what it used to be like decades ago: when the market was in a different location and the punks weren’t a tourist attraction.
I’d booked the apartment months before through Booking.com and regularly received messages via the website to inform me that our stay was months/weeks/days away (as if I didn’t know) and how the owners were tremendously excited about it all. There were a lot of smiley-face emojis.
The actual purpose of this pally communication was to remind me that I had to pay a rather hefty “damage deposit” before we would be given the entry codes to the property. A bit annoying, but that wasn’t what troubled me. It was the language in the messages: the phrasing was exactly the same each time. It was attempting to sound friendly and casual. It was attempting to sound human.
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A few days before we were due to arrive, I paid the deposit. I messaged the owners asking them to acknowledge the payment. I got a reply telling me how to pay the deposit. No, I’ve already paid the deposit. Here’s a link to pay the deposit! I’VE ALREADY PAID THE DEPOSIT.
This went on for some days: until the morning we were due to travel when I received a reply from an actual human being – he gave me his name – and he quickly sorted everything out.
[ The dark side of artificial intelligence is doomsday scaryOpens in new window ]
You could view this as a rather typical, and rather minor, customer service inconvenience. Yet, I found the whole experience creepy. I had felt in my bones that this was going to happen because I knew I was dealing with AI: an emotionless, morality-free entity that didn’t care if we had arrived in London and not had a place to stay and that lacked the empathy required to understand how stressful that might be.
I also resented having to interact with this thing and pretend it was a person. It didn’t announce itself as a bot. At one point I asked if it was AI. I asked could I communicate with a human. It didn’t reply.
I have messaged with bots before, and generally found them annoying. But this time it felt a bit dystopian. And the thing about dystopias is they don’t arrive pre-announced. They sneak up on you, and by the time you realise it, it’s far too late.
Or more precisely, we see it coming, but don’t do anything. We can, if we choose to, read accounts of how some versions of AI have already managed to escape human controls. We can listen to commentators and experts talk about the unknown ramifications for the economy, for culture, for the human sense of purpose. Yet we remain passive: because a small group of obscenely wealthy men have convinced us that it’s all inevitable, that governments and individuals have no choice in the matter. Best accept it, and plug yourself into the machine.
Once we had arrived and got into the apartment, I forgot my feelings of dread and we all concentrated on enjoying ourselves. London was boiling – that’s another story – yet we walked around and did some touristy things. We people-watched and eavesdropped on conversations. We went to restaurants I’d booked where the waiting staff called me See-ann.
On the way home, as expected, I received another message from the AI telling me how happy it was to host me. As if it were my friend: a word it could never hope to understand.
