Add to that a justice system also mostly automated and you are quickly caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare you can't get out if something goes wrong. Imagine the justice system run like google support. Even if something is clearly wrong you can't clear it up if you are not a famous person with a big Twitter following.
On the other hand, a justice system which has most of the menial tasks automated might have more resources to do the important tasks well.
Similarly, Google could have a mostly automated system detecting violations and such, and also a good human support system with power to override the decisions of the former; the two are not really incompatible.
> have a mostly automated system detecting violations and such, and also a good human support system with power to override the decisions of the former; the two are not really incompatible.
While that's true in the abstract, I don't think it's true in present society. Both private companies and government are under near-constant pressure to cut costs, and the people who are charged with implementing those cuts will be tempted to under-resource the human override team or cut it entirely. Quality of service isn't the priority.
The exact same argument can be made to those criticizing the use of automation: it doesn't matter, because that pressure means it will be used anyway. And the whole discussion becomes meaningless.
I know an Android dev who had his Play account shut down for an unjustified reason. It took him a very long time to reactivate it. Especially the little guy doesn't get much attention from humans. That was a few years ago. Maybe it's better now.
It's probably worse for a few, and better for a lot. Maybe the Google automation is shutting down a hundred nefarious developers for every one legitimate developer. Without the automation all would be active; with the automation one guy gets screwed and it's hard for him to navigate his way back, but thousands of users are better off
Most justice systems are built on the assumption that it's better to let 100 guilty people go than convicting one innocent person. Once we accept that it's OK to convict innocent people as long as the averages are fine then we are heading into serious trouble.
You're comparing a merchant system with a criminal justice system. Obviously the cost or the downside of false positive is very different between those two, as well as the cost of making the judgement itself, given the difference in scale.
On the other hand, a justice system which has most of the menial tasks automated might have more resources to do the important tasks well.
They said the same thing about banking when we got ATM's. But banking has only gotten worse, more impersonal, and more frustrating and alienating for the average person.
I'm not nearly old enough to remember prior to ATMs. But I love ATMs. I only have to go inside the bank to do things once every few years. Everything else is on the phone or ATM. And the people I deal with on the phone are almost always very helpful and knowledgeable.
I know people have a lot of trouble with some of the big banks like Bank of America and Chase. But those aren't issues with the banking industry but those specific companies. There's plenty of smaller banks and credit unions who don't exploit their customers at every opportunity.
I'm not nearly old enough to remember prior to ATMs.
I am. When ATM's started to become a thing, we were told that with ATM's automating the basics, the bankers and tellers would have more time for more personalized service, Banks would lower fees through cost savings, and we'd all have higher interest rates on our savings because the banks would save so much money.
None of those things happened. Things just got worse.
A couple of years ago I tried to get a loan. A credit union I tried to approach wouldn't let ask questions of someone on the phone, or in a branch, until I'd cleared the computer's online pre-screening.
At another bank (Chase), a banker sat down with me, but was not able to discuss my finances in any way. All he could do was punch my information into his computer, and give me the same information I would have gotten by doing the same process online.
Citibank, at least, let me talk to someone in person who seemed interested in my business. But then I went on vacation, and by the time I returned two weeks later, the offer was no longer valid and I was referred to the web site.
Again, things have gotten worse not better. Just because you're too young to know that things were once better doesn't mean they're not worse.
You're just using bad banks. I have a great private bank in San Francisco (First Republic), where I get personalized service via email, phone, or in person any time I need it. I can use any ATM in the world free of charge, and any time I want to do anything it's a quick email away. (Including opening new business accounts, complicated requests, ordering cash in $2 notes, whatever you could think of).
I'm familiar with First Republic. It's a nice bank. If you never leave the Bay Area, and the most complicated things you do can be accomplished at an ATM.
I'm pretty sure my needs are just as complex as yours. I run a venture fund and have a dozen accounts with them. It's just that anything I need can be done remotely. I've gone in branch (to deposit large amounts of cash or to order $2 bills) maybe 3 times in 10 years.
You are using banks wrong. That's not unexpected, most banks are designed to encourage you to use banks wrong and to in turn make this experience awful.
Last century, when I was a teenager, somebody set up a bank in the UK with an understanding of where all this is going. I have been with that bank ever since for my day-to-day banking needs.
The First Direct bank. They don't have any branches, they pay the same fees as other banks for there to be ATMs that work with their cards, and they own a web site and so on.
Instead of spending money on big solid-looking buildings people rarely visit, they run a massive 24/7 call centre, and all the call centre employees are trained to provide the entire service, since that's all they do. Absolutely every eventuality I've encountered was handled by telephoning them and then talking to a human. I often don't call them for six months at a time, but I've also had period when I called five times a day.
Two examples:
One day, still last century, I lost my wallet. Oh dear. I wanted to go out with friends, but I had no money, no cards. So I telephoned my bank. "Where are you?" they asked, because this was last century, so I was just a random voice with no indication of location. They looked up where I was, located some other bank building nearby and sent me there, then negotiated with that bank to give me cash.
This century, but a few years back, I bought somewhere to live. This involved a very large transaction. I phoned the bank, walked through exactly what I was doing and why, confirmed the transfer details and then they explained that no single employee of the bank is authorised to wave through such a transaction and I should expect to receive a phone call from another employee, who would confirm all the details again and then they could both authorise it. So I spoke to two people, for maybe a total of twenty minutes. Which considering the eye-watering sum of money that was about to just magically vanish from my account seems OK.
I don't understand why people would put up with any other sort of bank. I particularly don't understand people who are too busy to "go to the bank" on week days and then moan about it. This is 2018, I already didn't have to "go to the bank" in 1998. Get a better bank.
It's interesting that none of your examples has anything to do with ATMs, nor with the workers that ATMs replaced (as far as I know, tellers never gave out loans). Are you confident the introduction of ATMs was the reason that led to this reduction in quality of service?
I can‘t defend most banks but (I live in the in UK and) I’ve switch to Monzo who was explicitly built with that in mind: they manage to automate a lot of interactions, save on agencies, etc. explicitly to be able to invest more on services. This allows them to offer a visibly far better service. Thanks to automation, they have been profitable for a couple of months now (with a million customers) and have now switched on growth mechanisms.
Disclosure: I know several people working there but I have never used my contacts for preferential customer service, nor would I expect that the service could be better than the standard one.
Generally, I think that the incredible gains from automation are possible but require a lot of internal changes to make sense; changes that most companies do not have the leadership to conduct. This s why new actors often take advantage of those. I suspect that’s why Google replaced Encyclopedia Brittanica and countless more examples.
They've added (this week) the ability to pay in small amounts of cash through the Paypoint network (https://monzo.com/blog/2018/11/21/deposit-cash/) and I believe they'll eventually add support for paying in thorough Post Office branches too. It's still pretty limited, but it's a start!
How do you order foreign currency?
Honestly I had no idea people even used their bank to do this!
Honestly I had no idea people even used their bank to do this!
I do this all the time. Citibank has a service called World Wallet where you call a number, and they'll FedEx you whatever currency you want anywhere in the world in 24-48 hours.
I used to just use the American Express offices when I traveled, but as my travel got more interesting, AmEx outlets became less common. Also, AmEx started only stocking popular currencies, while the Citi service delivers pretty much any currency that's legal where you are.
I don’t have that use case but yes, they have announced a service to do that.
> How do you order foreign currency?
I would typically use my card at ATMs in a foreign country (which comes with a small fee above a certain amount). In practice, I almost always need cash abroad for reasons covered by work-related expenses, and I keep those transactions on my Revolut account.
USAA has only one physical location in San Antonio but they've never failed to be courteous and helpful over the phone. And their app is a great replacement for a physical location for most of my banking needs.
I wouldn't blame the automation - I would blame consolidation in the banking industry into ever-larger firms, which seldom have the customer's interests in mind.
Not my experience at all. I spent a lot of time in the 80s standing in bank lines with my mom for her to do things that anyone now does with an ATM or a banking app much much more quickly. And as an added benefit, when I do need to interact with an actual human at my bank, the lines are much shorter and the whole thing is just more efficient and far less aggravating.
Has it? I don't know, the people I know never had a good relationship with their banks. Plus, there were other changes; at least in some places, banks were much smaller than today. Is it not true where you live? If it is, couldn't that have the effects you describe?
If the escalation is accessible, everyone will try it. That includes anyone who got handled correctly.
And as detection becomes more accurate, an even larger ratio of escalations will be blatantly wrong.
This explains why slightly inept well meaning companies shy away from such escalation paths.
I wonder about the stats on appeals in court. How many are successful. How many go to an appeal at all. How costly is a single appeal / how costly is the average successful appeal.
"Escalation" implies the first decision is automated; I was suggesting more of a process where the "fact finding" is automated, but the decision is still manual.
That said, even the system you're describing and with a 100% escalation rate should be cheaper than a fully manual process. The problem is that those "well meaning" companies aren't; their goal is to minimize cost, stopping only if it drops their revenue. But no system will be good with such goals.
Another way to look at it is that an organization that is willing to automate everything for the sake of efficiency/profit is probably not too interested in "adding a lot more quality human support to compensate for that extreme automation".
Chances are it wants to automate 100% (or at least 99.99%) of it jobs and will strive to achieve that, while considering any human cost as "friction" or inefficiency that needs to be eliminated.
> On the other hand, a justice system which has most of the menial tasks automated might have more resources to do the important tasks well.
Justice systems are always about exceptions. Computers handle exceptions EXTREMELY poorly.
A justice system should be required to have a human on record for every action taken against another human being. The computers can be used to verify this, but they should not be allowed to be primary.
I don’t know how to compare the US justice system to Google support, but the former is already notoriously difficult, expensive, inefficient, and inaccessible to large groups of people.
The purpose of computers is to enhance the ability of humans who have a job to accomplish, not do their job for them. If we don't figure this out as a society, we're doomed.
Also the operators of a computer system should always be held responsible for any errors of that system. Mistakes by the system are your* mistakes. Any decisions made by the system must be explained by you. All costs rectifying those mistakes must be bared by you.
*Obviously "you" means your organization, company, etc. and not necessarily some random office clerk.
If you're big enough, Google provides excellent support. I was once responsible for a product that generated $30k/month in adsense revenue. It got banned due to adult content and my attempts to clean everything up weren't entirely successful. I ended up on chat with someone from adsense and they essentially held my hand for an hour as we found and removed every bit of porn in the product.
This sounds like a lot of people's experiences with Equifax and Transunion. They make a mistake and it can take you a decade and a lot of money and effort to clear your name.
I just finished reading The Secret Barrister and it already seems to be the case, at least in the UK, that if something is wrong you can't really clear it up.
This is literally the plot to the 1971 George Lucas sci-fi film THX 1138, down to the detail: "set in a dystopian future in which the populace is controlled through android police ... ."
It's one of the least automated systems (ie, employing technology to reduce inefficiencies) of all industry 'niches' in the western world.
Law enforcement might be using technology to dole out punishment/fines more efficiently, but the actual justice system that civilians have to deal with after getting fined or charged (ie, the world of lawyers, judges, and courts) is extremely backwards in their use of humans, paper, fax machines, etc. Not using even basic technology. The justice system is famous for the extreme slowness for the amount of human-time required in processing of even the most basic small details.
By eliminating the amount of human-time (by a hired lawyer or oneself) that each person has to engage the systems (for example by missing work or paying with money instead of time) would do a lot of help the poor better deal with the justice system - and get better and fairer treatment by the system.
This is something ordinary people who haven’t run afoul of the justice system cannot understand. It must be witnessed first hand to be comprehended.
The justice system is a big boulder at the top of a mountain. Once an arrest or accusation sets in it motion, unless you are powerful and or wealthy, it will do what boulders do, it can do no different. It is not cognizant, it just is.
It takes immense resources to stop or avoid this boulder. Resources far exceeding even the well-to-do often times.
The system is there to win cases and incarcerate and my god does it do just that.
Innocent or not, the system moves humans.
Do not pray the jury hears your side, pray you never get so much as accused. Look up the conviction rates for district attorneys across the country. You tell me, does that look justice?
I'd expect conviction rates to be pretty high. It means they are only bringing charges when they have strong evidence. If conviction rates were low I'd be asking why that prosecutor was wasting his time on cases he can't win.
It means they are only bringing charges when they have strong evidence
We would hope so. It could also mean far worse things are happening. We’ve all seen documentaries and news shows of people wrongly convicted. Why do we think the only incidences are the ones reported.
I’ve watched detectives lie on the stand when a guilty verdict was already in hand. Why do that? How do they treat the innocent if that’s how they act when the facts of the case are enough to convict?
