I work in tech, and any time I see a precipitous and incorrect decision like this — ESPECIALLY if it’s made by a technology company — the explanation that seems most plausible to me us that the management of that company has decided to implement an “Agentic” AI — i.e. a large-language model, attached to a program whose instructions are “Do whatever the large language model spits out”.
The problem is that large language models only care about spitting out an answer that sounds syntactically plausible. They’re designed to provide a response that is a reasonable simulacrum of human language, within a reasonably short timeout, but there is absolutely zero actual understanding behind it. It is basically a bullshit machine. There is no evaluation of veracity or reasonableness happening — that’s not a thing it’s capable of. It’s just trying to spit out a plausible answer before you get impatient and give up interacting with it.
Without doxxing myself, I’ve recently seen a case exactly like this in telecom.
A third -party project manager (not me, I was just a witness) put in a request like “Placeholder - port date to be determined for this toll-free number, belonging to Customer XYZ. I will update this ticket when the date is determine, and provide the required paperwork. For now, please just assign to the correct porting coordinator and hold.”
Instead of doing that, Carrier A’s customer support department immediately sent a port order to Carrier B, with the authorizer listed as [random person in customer’s call centre who wasn’t a manager and wouldn’t be listed as a signing authority on Carrier B’s billing record].
And then Carrier B, rather than being like “Who the fuck is Tragedeigh Molyneux? Our billing record clearly says that for Customer XYZ, the signing authority is Humperdink Snufflebugger” , instead just went ahead and released the toll-free number to Carrier A.
This was a couple months ago, and I can’t remember if callers were getting a busy signal, or just an infinite gentle-music hold loop, but it was a fucking shitshow, and the customer was furious.
We hurriedly implemented a workaround (a weird hairpin-routing-loopback to get callers to agents whose phones were still connected to Carrier B’s system), but the customer was absolutely furious about the outage; like “How TF could this have happened??? We never set a port date, and in any case, Ms. Molyneux never had signing authority to authorize changes with either Carrier A or Carrier B???”
And the poor project manager is getting absolutely excoriated, even though she never asked for this number to be ported immediately. She was just trying to give Carrier A lots of notice, because they are usually very behind on their port requests. And she’s just like “I don’t know, we’ll have to ask Carrier A and Carrier B to investigate how that decision was made within their support organizations.”
And like… to me, the technician watching this unfold, it seems that either:
A) Both Carrier A and Carrier B suddenly have customer support staff who are extremely eager to help, and also extremely lacking in critical thinking, or else
B) One (or both) of these carriers (one of whom is a large, publicly-traded company) has recently offloaded their first-pass ticket handling to an “agentic AI” (i.e. an LLM / syntactically-plausible bullshit machine, hooked directlyinto a system that just blindly implements any instructions the LLM sends to it).
I strongly suspect it’s Option B, because I’ve worked in this industry for over a decade, and I’ve never encountered a human person whose impulse to help wasn’t thoroughly outweighed by their fear of making a mistake that brings down an entire call centre.
From the Nashville Zoo’s fb page! Here’s the petition, please please please take a moment to add your name (even if you’re not from Nashville!). If you are from Tennessee, contact your representatives and make it clear that the people do not want this data center. This is an AZA accredited zoo which is home to several species of critically endangered animals, we NEED to protect it. Make your voice heard!
Do you ever think it's coming back? All that shit from the '90s? We were despised, but you read the stuff online now, it sounds just the same. Do I think it's coming back? Yeah. It's back, you fucking idiot. Right now, it's here.
FLY is a story about a boy who gets a second chance. Help his story take flight June 9th 11am EST on Kickstarter. Thank you for being the wind beneath my wings I hope this story lifts the world to a brighter place.
A coming of age story about Black kids who finally have power to fight back against systems designed against them.
given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that
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