Human-To-Machine Depersonalization Considerations and AI Systems: The Case of Autonomous Cars

Is automation and in particular AI leading us toward a service society that depersonalizes us?

In a prior column, I had described how AI can provide deep personalization via Machine Learning, and readers responded by asking about the concerns expressed in the mass media about the possibility of advanced automation depersonalizing us as humans and what I had to say about those qualms, so thanks to your feedback I’m covering herein the depersonalization topic.

Some pundits say yes, arguing that the human touch of providing services is becoming scarcer and scarcer, and eventually we’ll all be getting served by AI systems that treat us humans as though we are non-human. More and more we’ll see and experience that humans will lose their jobs to AI and be replaced by automation that is less costly, and notably less caring, eschewing us as individuals and abandoning personalized service. Those uncaring and heartless AI systems will simply stamp out whatever service is being sought by a human and there won’t be any soul in it, there won’t be any spark of humanity, it will be push-button automata only.

In my view, those pundits are seeing the glass as only half empty. They seem to not either notice or want to observe that the glass is also half full. Let me share with you some examples of what I mean.

Before I do so, please be aware that the word “depersonalization” can have a multitude of meanings. In the clinical or psychology field, it has a meaning of feeling detached or disconnected from your body and would be considered a type of mental disorder. I’m not using the word in that manner herein. Instead, the theme I’m invoking involves the humanization or dehumanization around us, floating the idea of being personalized to human needs or being depersonalized to them. That’s a societal frame rather than a purely psychological portrayal.

With that said, let’s use an example to get at my depersonalization and personalization theme.

Banking ATM As An Example Of Alleged Depersonalization

Banking is an area ripe with prior exhortations of how bad things would become once ATM’s took over as there would no longer be in-branch banking with human tellers (that’s what was predicted). We would all be slaves to ATM machines. You were going to stand in front of the ATM and yell out “where have all the humans gone?” as you fought with the banking system to perform a desired transaction.

Recently, I went to my local bank branch to make a deposit. I was in a hurry and opted to squeeze in this errand on my way to a business meeting. The deposit was somewhat sizable so I opted to go and perform the transaction with the human teller, rather than feed my deposit into the “impersonal” ATM.

Upon my coming up to the teller window, the teller provided a big smile and welcomed me to the bank. How’s my day going, the teller asked. The teller proceeded to mention that it had been a busy morning at the branch. Looking outside the branch window, the teller remarked that it looked like rain was on its way. I wanted to make the deposit and get going, yet could see that the chitchat, though friendly and warm, would keep dribbling along and wasn’t seemingly in pursuit of my desired transaction.

I presented my check to be deposited and was asked to first run my banking card through the pad at the teller window. I did so. The teller looked at my info on their screen and noted that I had not talked with one of their bankers for quite a while, offering to bring over a bank manager to say hello. I declined the gracious offer. The teller then noted that one of my CD’s was coming due in a month and suggested that I might want to consider various renewal options. Not just now, I demurred.

The teller finally proceeded with the deposit and then, just as I was stepping away to head-out, called me back to mention that they were having a special this week on opening new accounts. Would I be interested in doing so? As you can imagine, in my haste to get going, I quickly said no thanks and tried to make my way to the door. Turns out that the teller had already signaled to the bank manager and I was met at the door with a thanks for coming in by the pleasant manager, along with handing me a business card in case I had any follow-up needs.

Let’s unpack or dissect my in-branch experience.

On the one hand, you could say that I was favorably drenched in high-touch service. The teller engaged me in dialogue and tried to create a human-to-human connection. Rather than solely focusing on my transaction, I was offered a bevy of other options and possibilities. My banking history at the bank was used to identify opportunities for me to enhance my banking efforts at the bank. All in all, this would seem to be the picture-perfect example of human personalized service.

Having done lots of systems work in the banking industry, I know how hard it can be to get a branch to provide personalized and friendly service. One bank that I helped fix had a lousy reputation when I first was brought in, known for having branches that were terribly run. Whenever you went into a branch it was like going to a gulag. There were long lines, the tellers were ogres, and you felt as though you were a mere cog in a gigantic wheel of their banking procedures, often making the simplistic banking acts into a torturous affair.

Thus, my recent experience of making my deposit at my local branch should be a shining example of what a properly run bank branch is all about. If I were to have to choose between the somewhat over-friendly experience versus going to a branch that was like descending into Dante’s inferno, I certainly would choose the overly friendly case.

Nonetheless, I’d like to explore more deeply the enriched banking experience. I was in a hurry. The friendly dialogue and attempts to upsell me were getting in the way of a quick in-and-out banking transaction. In theory, the teller should have judged that I was in a hurry (I assure you that I offered numerous overt signals as such) and toned down the ultra-service effort. It is hard perhaps to fault the teller and one might point at whatever pressures there are on the teller to do the banking jingle, perhaps drummed into the teller as part of the training efforts at the bank and likely baked into performance metrics and bonuses.

In any case, I walked out of the branch grumbling and vowed that in the future I would use the ATM. Unfair, you say? Maybe. Am I being a whiner by “complaining” about too much personalized service? Maybe. But it shouldn’t be that I have to make a choice between the rampant personalized service versus the utterly depersonalized gulag service. I should be able to choose which suits my service needs at the time of consuming the service.

About a week later, I had to make another deposit and this time used the drive-thru ATM. After entering my PIN, the screen popped-up asking if I was there to make a deposit, and if so, there was a one-click offered to immediately shift into deposit taking mode. I used the one-click, slipped my check into the ATM, it then scanned and asked me to confirm the amount, which I did, and the ATM then indicated that I usually don’t get a printed receipt and unless I wanted one this time, it wasn’t going to print one out.

I was satisfied that the deposit seemed to have been made and so I put my car into gear and drove on. The entire transaction time must have been around 30 seconds at most, making it many times faster than when I had made a deposit via the teller. I did not have to endure any chitchat about the weather. I was not bombarded with efforts to upsell me. In-and-out, the effort was completed, readily, without fanfare.

Notice that the ATM had predicted that I was there to make a deposit. That was handy. Based on my last several transactions with the bank, the banking system had analyzed my pattern and logically deduced that I was most likely there to make a deposit. And, I was offered a one-click option to proceed with making my deposit, which showcased that not only was my behavior anticipated, the ATM tailored its actions to enable my transaction to proceed smoothly.

Would you say that my ATM experience was one of a personalized nature or a depersonalized nature?

Deciding On Whether There Is Depersonalization Or Personalization

We always tend to assume that whenever something is “depersonalized” that it must be bad. The word has a connotation that suggests something untoward. Nobody wants to be depersonalized. In the case of the ATM, I wasn’t asked about the weather and there wasn’t a smiling human that spoke with me. I interacted solely with the automation. If that’s the case, ergo I must be getting “depersonalized” service, one would assume.

Yet, my ATM experience was actually personalized. The system had anticipated that I wanted to make a deposit. This had been followed-up by making the act of depositing easy. Once I had made the deposit, the ATM did not just spit out a receipt, which often is what happens (and I frequently see deposit receipts laying on the ground near the ATM, presumably leftover by hurried humans). The ATM knew via my prior history that I tended to not get a receipt and therefore the default was going to be that it would not produce one in this instance.

Given the other kinds of more sophisticated patterns in my banking behavior that could be found by using AI capabilities, I thought that this ATM experience was illustrative of how even simple automation can provide a personalized service experience. Imagine what more could be done if we added some hefty Machine Learning or Deep Learning into this.

I’ve used the case of the banking effort to help illuminate the notion of what constitutes personalization versus depersonalization. Many seem to assume that if you remove the human service provider, you are axiomatically creating a depersonalized service. I don’t agree.

Take a look at Figure 1.

As shown, the performance of a service act consists of the service provider and the receiver of the service, the customer. Generally, when considering depersonalized service, we think about the service provider as being perfunctory, dry, lacking in emotion, unfeeling, aloof, and otherwise without an expression of caring for the customer. We also then think about the receiver of the service, the customer, and their reaction of presumably becoming upset at the lack of empathy to their plight as they are trying to obtain or consume the service.

I argue that the service provider can provide a personalized or depersonalized service, either one, even if it is a human providing the service. The mere act of having a human provide a service does not make it personalized. I’m sure you’ve encountered humans that treated you as though you were inconsequential, as though you were on an assembly line, and they had very little if any personalization, likely bordering on or perhaps fully enmeshed into depersonalization.

A month ago, I ventured to use the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) office and was amazed at how depersonalized they were able to make things. Each of the human workers in the DMV office had that look as though they would prefer to be anyplace but working in the DMV. The people flowing into the DMV were admittedly rancorous and often difficult to contend with. I’m sure these DMV workers had their fill each day of people that were grotesquely impolite and cantankerous.

In any case, there were signs telling you to stand here, move there, wait for this, wait for that. Similar to getting through an airport screening, this was a giant mechanism to move the masses through the process. I’m sure it was as numbing for the DMV workers as it was for those of us there to get a driver’s license transaction undertaken.

Let’s all agree then that you can have a human that provides a personalized or a depersonalized service, which will be contingent on a variety of factors, such as the processes involved, the incentives for the human service provider, and the like.

I’d to like next assert that automation can also provide either a personalized service or a depersonalized service. Those are both viable possibilities.

Depends On How The Automation Is Devised

It all depends upon how the automation has been established. In my view, if you add AI to providing a service, and do it well, you are going to have a solid chance of making that service personalized. This won’t happen by chance alone. In fact, by chance alone, you are probably going to have AI service that seems depersonalized.

We might at first assume that the automation is going to be providing a depersonalized service, likewise we might at first assume that a human will provide a personalized service. That’s our usual bias. Either of those assumptions can be upended.

Furthermore, it can be tricky to ascertain what personalized versus depersonalized service consists of. In my example about the bank branch and the teller, everything about the setup would seem to suggest a high-touch personalized service. I’m sure the bank spent a lot of money to try and arrive at the high-touch level of service. Yet, in my case, in the instance of wanting to hurriedly do a transaction, the high-touch personalized service actually defeated itself.

That’s a problem with having personalized service that is ironically inflexible. It is ironic in that the assumption is that personalized means that you will be incessantly presented with seeming personalization. Instead, the personalization should be based on the human receiving the service and what makes most sense for them. Had the teller picked-up on the aspect that I was in a hurry, it would have been relatively easy to switch into a mode of aiding my transaction and getting me out of the bank, doing so without undermining the overarching notion of personalization.

For those of you that are AI developers, I hope that you keep in mind these facets about depersonalization and personalization. Namely, via AI, you have a chance at making a service providing system more responsive and able to provide personalization, yet if you don’t seek that possibility, the odds are that your AI system will appear to be the furtherance of depersonalization.

Humans interacting with your AI system are more likely to be predisposed to the belief that your AI will be depersonalizing.

In that sense, you have a larger hurdle to jump over. In the case of a human providing a service, by-and-large we all tend to assume that it is likely to be imbued with personalization, though for circumstances like the DMV and airport screening we’ve all gotten used to the idea that you are unlikely to get personalized service in those situations (when it happens, we are often surprised and make special note of it).

You also need to take into account that there is personalization of an inflexible nature, which can then undermine the personalization being delivered. As indicated via the bank branch example, using that as an analogy, consider that if you do have AI that seems to provide personalization, don’t go overboard and force whatever monolithic personalization that you came up with onto all cases of providing the service. Truly, personalized service should be personalized to the needs of the customer in-hand.

AI Self-Driving Cars As An Example

What does this have to do with AI self-driving driverless autonomous cars?

At the Cybernetic AI Self-Driving Car Institute, we are developing AI software for self-driving cars. There are numerous ways in which the AI can either come across as personalized or depersonalized, and it is important for auto makers and tech firms to realize this and devise their AI systems accordingly.

Allow me to elaborate.

I’d like to first clarify and introduce the notion that there are varying levels of AI self-driving cars. The topmost level is considered Level 5. A Level 5 self-driving car is one that is being driven by the AI and there is no human driver involved. For the design of Level 5 self-driving cars, the auto makers are even removing the gas pedal, brake pedal, and steering wheel, since those are contraptions used by human drivers. The Level 5 self-driving car is not being driven by a human and nor is there an expectation that a human driver will be present in the self-driving car. It’s all on the shoulders of the AI to drive the car.

For self-driving cars less than a Level 5, there must be a human driver present in the car. The human driver is currently considered the responsible party for the acts of the car. The AI and the human driver are co-sharing the driving task. In spite of this co-sharing, the human is supposed to remain fully immersed into the driving task and be ready at all times to perform the driving task. I’ve repeatedly warned about the dangers of this co-sharing arrangement and predicted it will produce many untoward results.