Auto-mate-ic?

Recently, I’ve heard a lot of middle-aged people bemoaning automated services as ‘you don’t get to talk to a proper person’ or ‘A machine never smiles at you’.

This is the latest major gripe. The gripe before this one was ‘I don’t want to talk to someone in a call centre in INDIA, I want to talk to someone I can understand’. A lot of companies buckled and moved call centre operations back to the UK. Some companies cunningly renamed Talan or Anjalli ‘Darren’ or ‘Stacey’ to give their customers the impression that they were phoning a call centre in the UK. For the cannier caller, knowing that someone called ‘Darren’ probably didn’t spend his childhood learning English in Lahore kind of gave the ruse away. Frankly, I had no problems with call centres in India. I’d rather have my mobile phone topped up by someone with a PhD in nuclear physics than a reject of the McDonalds training programme. In that respect, global inequality worked very much to my favour.

The new complaint is about supermarket self-service kiosks, an older one is about ATMs. The problem with these technologies (apparently) is that the customer is denied a smiling face and the personal touch. Frankly, they can keep it. I don’t know what country people think they’re suddenly living in but the chances of getting a cashier to give you a cheery smile and the benefit of their years or scanning experience are very slim indeed. Not being a particularly organised child, I generally do my food shopping 25 minutes before I cut my purchase up or poke holes in it and shove it in a hot place. I don’t need po-faced incompetence to be yet another step between me and eating. I’d rather not wait behind a woman who has bought an army standard year’s supply of toilet paper and pizzas whilst I queue patiently with my £4.27 worth of sub-luxury goods. Furthermore a machine will never judge me for buying economy tuna or a sensitive brand of condom (during my bi-annual contraceptive purchase).

I am by no means a misanthrope (not by UK standards anyway), it’s just there are too many people to deal with in everyday life, and (this being 2009 after all) surprisingly few robots. I say let’s even up the balance. As we all know, the place of robots in society has been a constant pant-wetting controversy since a Tomorrow's World presenter was stabbed in the knee by a suddenly self-aware kitchen helper robot in 1971. Thus I've tried to rationalise the automaton's role in society:

Robots dispensing cash – GOOD THING.

Robots totalling up my shopping – GOOD THING.

Robots with guns – BAD THING (see Terminator).

Robots driving taxis – BAD THING (see Total Recall).

Robot prostitutes – DECISION PENDING (see Blade Runner and AI...but only if you're really out of options at Blockbusters).