golem: [noun] an artificial human being in Hebrew folklore endowed with life. – Merriam-Webster
According to legend, a golem was animated by instructions applied to its forehead and could be deactivated when those instructions were removed. The golem had no ability to think or decide. It could only carry out orders. This creature is usually brought to life through magical rituals or procedures and is limited to obeying any order of its creator in a literal way.
Like a well-designed chatbot, this modern golem simulates life until you present it with information it cannot handle, and then you encounter the implacable unreasonableness of a system that only mimics life but does not demonstrate it.
When an AI system is presented with data it is programmed to expect, it gives the impression it is capable of making intelligent decisions. When the data you are presenting to the system falls outside the limits of what it is programmed for, the results cannot be predicted and the system response fails its purpose.
Putting such a golem in charge of your life, as in an automobile or financial transactions, is extreme folly, which is why all AI systems interfacing with human beings should provide an override to access human support.
The trap we can fall into is that these AI designs are incredibly efficient when presented with inputs limited to what they are designed for. This lulls the inexperienced designer to assume they have covered all possible cases and not provide a means to override the design in case of failure.
This means that a poorly designed AI system handling human problems acts like a wood chipper which does not distinguish between human hands and the wood it is designed to chip. Fortunately, woodchippers have a manual override. Some AI systems do not.
Whining about mistreatment by a corporation is annoying news, even when it is the honest truth. If you want to get your message out, it needs to be interesting, even shocking, and if possible, amusing!
I am sure that many of you are familiar with the tale of the emperor’s new clothes which was written in 1837. Some con men sold the emperor on the idea of a beautiful new suit and the emperor and his court went along with the fiction because no one wanted to be the person who would admit that there was no suit. Even the emperor went along with the fiction, perhaps because he was a trusting sort of person. No one else wanted to admit they could not see the emperor’s new suit because no one wanted to be thought of as a simpleton or unfit for their job.
In today’s world, artificial intelligence (AI) is the beautiful new suit for corporations seeking to save money by replacing human employees with robots. AI is powering phone systems, chatbots, assembly lines, translation systems, driving automobiles, and performing customer service duties. AI does a remarkable job on routine tasks and saves thousands of hours of valuable human resources when it is applied to those tasks.
When AI replaces human beings in driving vehicles, there are many roads that this system cannot handle and a human driver has to take over.
When AI is used for customer service duties, it can be a catastrophe waiting to occur. Why? Because AI does not handle random inputs well. Customer data entry will always contain some errors whether voice-based or keyboard entries. If the AI-driven system does not provide the user access to a human supervisor, as is the case at Square, the system can make judgments that are costly to customers and ruinous to small businesses. If you are using Square to process funds, this could be you.
Man vs artificial intelligence. Pop art retro vector illustration drawing
If you search the internet for “Problems with AI customer support”, you will find many examples of scenarios where AI is ineffective. In financial transactions, when there is a problem customers want interaction with a real human being. A system that denies you interaction with human beings, as is the case at Square, generates more ill will than you can imagine. I am sure that this is not because the people at Square are evil, it is more a case that they have all bought the story that AI will allow them to replace human customer support with robots.
A robot cannot care for a customer and if it is set to detect errors in data input and freeze funds for 90 days, that is what it will do without fail. At Square, they have attempted to handle data entry errors by using another AI system to interview the business owner, instead of using a customer service person who could clear the matter up in one call. The robot interview contains some serious programming errors and as a result, it attempts to solve them by repeating the interview until you figure out the answer the system is looking for. The thousands of online complaints about this robot interview show that no human being is looking at the results. As a result, Square is building a reputation for freezing customer funds for no good reason and this will eventually result in many people realizing that the emperor has no clothes when it comes to customer support.
If your company is considering using AI for customer support, look at the suggestions given by companies who are successfully using AI in the customer interface. Use this search to help you with your system design: Pros and cons with AI customer support
Example of a Square customer support questionnaire
This is what you get when you make a data entry error or the AI system thinks you are a high risk customer because you have a transaction larger than what the system considers normal. They put you through a robot interrogation to determine if you are a high risk customer.
A high risk transfer according to Square, is an international purchase or a card not present transaction. If you are an online business with overseas customers, you should avoid Square. If you have a transaction larger than usual, you should use another service to handle it as Square will freeze your money based on their models. The risk evaluation is based on Square’s machine learning models which seem to be flawed if the customer complaints are to be believed.
After Square froze my account for 90 days after a data entry error and prevented me from contacting a human customer service person, I decided to look for others who may have been victims of Square’s automated customer support system.
It turns out that there are thousands of small and large businesses which have been damaged by Square’s robot card processing systems and it has been happening for years.
When they freeze money paid to a company, this impacts the company and the customer who has paid for service, since not every company can deliver if they have not received payment. Square is an enormous company with a terrible customer service record and they have been able to cover up the complaints until recently.
Here is a partial list of complaints against Square
Square uses AI to handle its customer interface and does not provide help from human employees. There are thousands of complaints about Square freezing the accounts of existing customers with no feedback on what went wrong. They then use a computer-generated questionnaire to determine if you are a suitable customer and if the system does not like your answers, your account stays frozen for 90 days or more.
I went to the BBB site to see what the BBB had to say about Square and found that customer reviews are not used by the BBB in calculating a rating! If you have questions about Square, you need to go to the Internet and see what customers are saying.
If you have an online business, you are putting your reputation at risk by using Square for money transfers.
In session today, a client wanted to learn if he could finally be alone as a spirit if he got sufficient spiritual counseling. I realized that I have never made the truth clear enough so you could plan for your future. You will never be alone on this planet, so you need to recruit friendly spirits if you plan to be successful at anything worthwhile.
This planet has been a dumping ground for misbehaving spirits for millions and millions of years and they are all still here and interacting with spirits trying to animate and run bodies. There are definitely trillions of disembodied spirits here. If they are awake and aware, they may act as spirit guides. If they are still in a hypnotic state, their reactions can be very erratic and they will cause all sorts of problems for the humans they are attached to. All spirits are immortal and until they have been rescued and brought out of their hypnotic states, they act as though they are stuck in some past event and their reactions do not relate well to what is actually happening in present time.
This diagram shows some of the spirits surrounding us and they surround us whether we have live bodies or if we are dead. The different sizes illustrate the different energy level of the various spirits.
Some of these disembodied spirits have been with us for millions of years and we and they are not aware of each other as separate beings. Other spirits stay associated with us but consider themselves separate and feel they need to monitor us and influence us to make us behave in certain ways. This relationship is described in detail in various religions but is clearly described in my book, Talking To Spirits, available on Amazon and elsewhere.
The common philosophical positioning of body, mind, and spirit is completely inadequate. The “I” that is used to describe the being animating a body is actually a “WE” as we are all composite beings, that is a group of beings acting in concert. I have been able to prove this by addressing various personality aspects as individuals and sorting out their different histories.
To make matters more complicated, every cell in the body has its own collection of spirits animating it and these spirits react to environmental stimuli in different ways. These beings may not take part in the high-level thinking of the “WE” beings but they influence those beings as they respond to the environment.
In essence, we earth people are traveling spiritual circuses complete with clowns, villains, and beings with godlike potential and we are surrounded by beings who have suffered mightily but have enormous potential if we can wake them up.
So, here you are reading this post and wondering why I have made it seem so complicated. Once you are willing to perceive the beings who are helping you and chattering at you and distracting you, you can finally start communicating with them and getting them to help you. If you are willing to perceive them, you will realize that they are an almost infinite resource for you.
Those of you who have learned to meditate are probably familiar with the ideas that come to you and quiet down once you become calm. These ideas are from the spirits who surround you as spirits are essentially living thoughts. Some of you can perceive spirits as voices in your head. Others will perceive spirits as images or emotions. When you learn to work with the spirits who surround you, you can get advice and information to help you in life. Some talented people have spirits helping them compose music, or write books and articles, while others have spirits who help them create paintings or objects of great beauty.
A person who has no understanding of spirits or any ability to control spirits will find themselves constantly distracted and beset with emotions they cannot control. In the very worst case, these people can find themselves possessed by spirits and exhibit multiple personalities which are not under their control.
If you are willing to find out about spirits and communicate with them, your life becomes much richer as you can begin to draw upon the experiences of beings who have done everything from running nations to flying spaceships to building empires from scratch. Immortal beings have a lot of experiences to share once you wake them up and ask them for help. They have made every mistake in the books and when you rescue them from the incidents they are stuck in, you get the benefit of their experience and in some cases their continuing assistance.
