Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.
Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, we don't get fooled again."
Automation can be transformative, relieving us of danger and drudgery by getting a machine to pick up some of the heavy work. Ideally automation seamlessly swaps a human for a machine at some stage in a process (ideally, the boring, dangerous and/or difficult phase). Like, whipping egg-whites for a meringue is hard on your wrist. But swap your whisk for a hand blender, and suddenly that tiresom process becomes fast and easy. If the blender is cordless, you can use it anywhere in your kitchen, including wherever you would have stood over a bowl with a whisk.
A mixer, by contrast, requires more labor on your part: you have to decant the contents of your mixing bowl into the mixer, run its motor, and then scrape the whipped whites back into your bowl for the next phase. It's worse automation.
But the worst automation would be a mixer that requires a special electrical outlet, a different fridge, and a special egg-carton. You would have to redesign your whole kitchen to use that thing. Sure, it might produce perfect meringues, and sure, if you had a meringue factory it might be a great solution. But for everyday use, it's a solution that creates more problems than it solves.
AI pitchmen promise that seamless swapping of a human tethered to some choresome drudgery for software. That's the whole point of self-driving cars: each of us can swap a standard car for one with an autopilot and use the same roads, with the same road-users, to get to all the same places. We don't have to tear up all the roads and lay tracks, or fill the roadside environment with sensors and beacons to help the "self-driving" cars navigate the system. A self-driving car can share the road with human-piloted vehicles, even when those other vehicles are driven by humans who don't see why they should allow a robot to merge into their lane or have the right of way, even if the human is turning left into oncoming robo-traffic.
Self-driving cars are not very good at this stuff, as it turns out. When that became apparent, self-driving car hucksters announced that it was only reasonable for their products to require something of the rest of us. As Andrew Ng put it:
“I think many AV teams could handle a pogo stick user in pedestrian crosswalk,” Ng told me. “Having said that, bouncing on a pogo stick in the middle of a highway would be really dangerous.”
“Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.”
This is an incredible act of shameless bait-and-switchery. In just a few short sentences, Ng's cars go from being the kind of automation that is purely the concern of the person who uses it – the owner of a self-driving car – to the kind of automation that everyone in the world has to adjust to, lest we become part of the "pogo stick problem."
Making a car that can navigate a well-behaved, non-adversarial world is relatively straightforward. But demanding that the entire world behave itself? Well, that's the hard problem of 100,000 years of civilization and ethics. A product that only works in an ideal world isn't a viable product.
Self-driving car boosters didn't invent this wheeze, either. The entire concept of "pedestrian" (and later, "jaywalker") was invented by the auto industry to shift blame for the death and destruction the wealthy owners of their products inflicted on everyday people to the victims:
The latest peddlers of pogo-stick demands are the agentic AI people. They have raised (hundreds of) billions of dollars by promising that they will make AIs that can autopilot your browser to accomplish tedious, time-consuming tasks, visiting the same websites you would visit, locating and processing the information needed to perform the task you've set for it. This will supposedly make all kinds of human workers obsolete (which is where the hundreds of billions of dollars come in – the whole AI investor pitch is "We are developing technology that will let bosses fire their workers").
But agentic AI sucks. Asking a chatbot to take a screenshot of a website, then make guesses about which parts of it are links and what those links do, choose one link to fire a click at, and then start again is a recipe for incredible dysfunction. That's even before we get into "hallucinations" (this is AI jargon for "errors").
A more mature agentic AI apologetics admits that while no one knows how to make an AI that can navigate the whole internet, we can make specialist agents that can perform one kind of task, then hand off the output from that task to the next agent, and the next. This also sucks: you're created a whole menagerie of AIs, each of which is prone to its own failure modes, and then combining them, multiplying all those error potentials together, sending erroneous findings careening through a cascade of downstream AIs. This is broken-telephone-as-a-service. Give it your credit card, ask it to order a bag of jucing oranges, and six months later someone's gonna back a 16 wheeler up to your front door with $40,000 worth of frozen OJ and a receipt for a futures contract you're on the hook for.
The latest agentic AI pitch "solves" this problem by asserting that the whole internet will simply have to accommodate itself to AI agents. Every website will have to adopt robust, accurate semantics that describe its navigation and offerings, standardized across every domain of human activity. This would be great. The semantic web people have been trying to make it happen since 1999, with no success to speak of, for reasons I identified more than 20 years ago:
The reason websites don't make their results easy to scrape and compare is that they want to cheat you. They want you to buy something more expensive and/or inferior than the best match for your desire. There is no way for an AI agent to know when a website is lying to it, and the websites that lie the most are incentivized to have the best, highest-grade automation hooks for an AI agent to connect to (just as spammers have the best, most pristine anti-spam indicia, from DKIM to SPF to DMARC records).
And these cheaters aren't fringe players – they're the biggest companies out there. Amazon knows that Prime members don't shop around, so it presents them with higher prices than non-Prime users. Airlines use AI and surveillance data to estimate your desperation and price their tickets accordingly:
The hard part of comparison-shopping for an airline isn't sorting a database of all the prices offered to all customers under all circumstances: it's compiling such a database. We don't need complex AI-based techniques to perform a simple sort – we need AI to solve the problem of knowing what prices every airline is charging at this instant to every flier for every itinerary.
When agentic AI grifters insist that the entire internet has to adopt and faithfully use standard APIs so their bots can accurately analyze the internet's contents, they are re-inventing the pogo-stick problem. Yes, if you could get the entire world to arrange its affairs to your benefit, you could surely do some incredible things, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a rollerskate.
Even if you could get everyone to adopt a standard set of APIs and use them well, this is a titanic engineering challenge, at least as big as anything the agentic AI people are promising to do.
There's an unassailable response to the assertion that you could do amazing things as soon as everyone else upends their life to make things more convenient for you, the sacred principle of "wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which will be full first":
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
hey what do you think about this bait-and-switch template
[Image description: a black field with white text that reads as follows:
If you were linked to here and clicked said link, it means you were hungry for "drama" and/or "controversy".
This behavior is unhealthy and will make you rot away in despair, unable to change the world around you.
You are now morally obligated to turn off your device and do something offline.
Instacart's Customer Service Hung Up On Me After Claiming No Responsibility For Website's Listings
While I have had my difficulties with customer service in the past -- most notably trying to reach an actual human at Google several years back -- I have rarely had such an unrepentantly bad experience as I had today with Instacart's customer service and the bait-and-switch that I experienced with their website.
As a result, I would be extremely cautious about giving Instacart -- which bragged of US$2.5 BILLION in revenues in 2022 -- any money as a consumer or as an investor in their probable IPO later this year.
Going From Annoyance To Anger Because Of Horrible Instacart Customer Service
I have been using Instacart during the pandemic, and particularly since I started working third shift. Sometimes there are replacements, sometimes things aren't in stock, and that's annoying, but doable. As an Instacart+ member, I will also sometimes specifically make an order to get one item, and then add on other things that would be "nice" to get.
Caffeine -- specifically, generic diet soda from Aldi -- is one of those central, key items for me. That particular item was "material" (using the FTC definition here) to my decision to make an order at all today. So I was pleased to see that Instacart's website listed that soda as "many in stock."
Since there were "many in stock," I made sure I selected that specific item only -- because that item is half the price of the closest brand-name competitor.
I was surprised to get out of the shower to find that the shopper had refunded the item, saying that there were none in stock.
I double-checked with the shopper and I re-examined Instacart's website, which still listed there as being "many in stock." Instacart's website still claims that there are "many in stock" as I write this. So I decided to contact Instacart and ask what led to that disconnect.
And that, friends, is where this all started to spiral.
Instacart's entire business model is based on the idea that you give them money so that they can make things more convenient for you.
Finding out that the main (or "material") reason you made an order at all -- something you were assured is availabe -- turns out to not be available seems to violate the whole value proposition of the company.
The first customer support person I chatted with said that it was the store's fault -- something that was repeated time and again by Instacart support personnel. I was told that the sole resolution was that they would "escalate it." That was an unacceptable "resolution" for me. I'd just been burned by trusting Instacart's website, so saying that I should just trust that it would be escalated and handled by someone at Instacart, sometime in the future, seemed like less of a resolution of my issue and more of a "make the guy go away" kind of thing.
It got worse from there. I asked the representative to not disconnect from the chat while I checked the rest of the (just delivered) order. Almost immediately, that representative handed me off to someone else and disconnected from the chat. That second representative did not review the prior chat. I said:
"I have an issue with Instacart saying that a SPECIFIC item that was a key part of my order had 'many in stock' -- both before and AFTER the shopper said there were NONE in stock."
That agent did not respond, immediately transferred me to someone else, who then immediately closed the chat competely.
So I called.
As an aside, I thought it very interesting that while Instacart seems to think it's cool to just say they are recording those conversations without giving you an opportunity to opt out of that recording, their representatives get really bent out of shape when you say that you are also recording the conversation for quality control purposes.
I outlined the situation to the next representative I spoke to ("Toby", as best I could make out), including my increasing anger at having been "hung up on" in the help chat as poor customer service.
Toby also tried to deny that Instacart had any responsibility for the listings on the website, saying that those listings were up to the stores in question.
I asked Toby point-blank if it was Instacart's official stance that the listings on the website may not reflect what is actually available. Toby denied that, then again tried to say that what was or was not available is not Instacart's responsibility and that substitutions were available for that reason.
Bait And Switch
It's worth taking a moment to really dwell on this. Over and over again, the customer service representatives at Instacart were consistent about saying that Instacart had no responsibility for what was or was advertised as being available on Instacart's website. Across the board, Instacart employees asserted that it was entirely the fault of the supermarket.
Here's the rub, though. I did not make a purchase from that supermarket. I made a purchase from INSTACART. Saying that I could have chosen a substitution that cost twice the price sounds after advertising a lower-cost item being readily available comes pretty damn close to the definition of "bait-and-switch":
Bait and switch is a fraudulent activity whereby a company advertises goods at an incredibly low price with the aim of substituting for them with inferior or pricier alternatives at the time of purchase ... instead of getting the item initially advertised – the item that “baited” them to come and shop, the company attempts to do a switch and sell the consumer an entirely different product. In many instances, the item the retailer is trying to sell is either of inferior quality or more expensive than the advertised product. Either way, it is an act of fraud that is punishable in a court of law.
Unfortunately, once the customer visits the store, he is confronted with ... he tablet or other advertised product is out of stock, but the customer is informed that other, similar options are available – for a higher price.
The FTC's definition is even more damning:
According to the FTC's Deception Policy Statement, an ad is deceptive if it contains a statement - or omits information - that:
- Is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances; and
- Is "material" - that is, important to a consumer's decision to buy or use the product.
I then asked Toby to tell me what Instacart was going to do to keep me as a customer instead of canceling my Instacart+ subscription immediately. I was told, again, that the only resolution on the table was to trust Instacart to resolve the problem in the future.
And then it got even worse.
When I said that I wished to cancel my subscription and recieve a prorated refund for the nine months left on it -- approximately US$75 -- I was transferred to another representative, who told me that a refund was not possible. They could cancel my account, but I would just have to forfeit the remainder of the subscription.
I'm not keen on paying for things that I've canceled.
When I said that I would wait until a weekday in the hopes that someone with more authority would be available, that representative -- who repeatedly interrupted and talked over me -- hung up on me.
It could have gone so differently.
Here's a few things to keep in mind.
First, I would be writing a very, very different post if Instacart's customer service had been competent or empathic.
In 2007, I wrote an entire article in an advertising magazine about how Amazon's customer service exceeded my expectations. While Amazon has since been exposed for a lot of bad behind-the-scenes workplace conditions for workers, that kind of good customer service also has done a lot for the company. As I wrote in that article,
It is not just common sense that a customer’s trust is good for business. In 2001, a study was published in the International Journal of Service Industry Management. That study showed that customers who trusted a company not only think more favorably about it, but they began to talk about that company to their friends. Customer trust leads to both future sales and honest word-of-mouth advertising.
If I'd been offered anything -- from "we'll give you $16 credit with us for your next soda" to "here's the $75 prorated part of your subscription you did not use" -- I would feel neutrally or even positively about Instacart.
Instead, I'm annoyed, angry, and seriously wondering how long Instacart is going to survive in a more-competitive environment with this kind of arrogant customer service.
Putting It In Perspective
The fact that this is a small amount of money is exactly why I am so irritated. There is absolutely no reason for this to have gone this way, unless Instacart is either hopelessly arrogant or is so cash-strapped that my $75 somehow matters to a multi-billion dollar company.
Instacart was founded a decade ago, with an annual revenue in 2021 of US $1,800,000,000. The company is currently led by CEO Fidji Simo and COO Asha Sharma, and recently told employees "that revenues jumped more than 50% in the final quarter of 2022, while gross profit climbed more than 80%," according to an internal memo cited by the WSJ in February. Other sources, according to reporting in PYMNTS, told the WSJ "that Instacart’s full-year revenue rose 39% to around $2.5 billion for 2022, while it processes $29 billion in overall sales, a 16% increase from 2021." Instacart initially planned an IPO in 2022, but delayed that plan, and is still considering that IPO in 2023 despite the Fed increasing interest rates and a historically bad year for IPOs in 2022.
For a company whose entire existence is based around the idea of convenience and customer service, you would think that US$75 -- or 0.003% of Instacart's two and a half BILLION dollars of revenue from last year -- would be a small thing.
Instead, Instacart's policies and godawful customer service have changed me from a customer who willingly paid for the service to one who wants nothing to do with them -- but is more than willing to write 1700 words detailing exactly how messed up their experience, from the bait-and-switch on the website (y'all have had a decade to figure this out!) to the scripts the CS reps had to read from (Chief Marketing Officer Laura Jones may wish to really reflect on those), to the corporate policy about not offering prorated refunds to aggreived customers.
I can only assume that I am not the only person to have this experience with the company. It's far more likely that I am the tip of the iceberg, and just the one writing about it where other consumers, investors, and even the C-suite at Instacart itself may find it.
Given this experience, I would be extremely cautious about giving Instacart any money -- either as a consumer or as an investor.
Featured Image by ElasticComputeFarm from Pixabay
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I know, I know…I went through the month of November without a blog post; but I’m back with a super-sized entry rivaling the amount of food you may have enjoyed this past Thanksgiving. So, buckle up. This one’s a wild ride, to be sure.
Part
of the reason I’ve been quiet here is on account of my current job hunt. Job
hunting is never pleasant. There’s a lot of stress involved in making…
