Many years ago, a few biiiig companies started to have this really neat automated phone tree system. You called in, the robot said you were allowed to ask for whatever you wanted, and then it shut up. If you said some long sentence explaining what you wanted, it somehow knew where to direct your call. Background noise? No problem. Not sure what department you need? No problem, it just knows! What a cool robot, right?
Anyway, they accomplished this using cheap human labor. Not sure if they still do this stuff today, but it seems likely, right? I worked at one of these facilities. It was a sad little office building, unlabeled and hidden between a bunch of warehouses. There was one pathetic break room and then The Computer Zone that looked like a middle school computer lab.
You sit at a computer, log in, and put on a headset. A "call" comes in. When someone tells one of those phone tree robots "Hey I need to know how to buy a ____", it sends that audio clip to your headset while simultaneously showing a bespoke array of buttons on your computer screen. The buttons represent different parts of the phone tree. "Billing", "Repairs", etc. As you listen to the audio, you click one of the buttons to direct the call to the correct part of the tree. In order to help with accuracy, 2-3 people receive the same audio clip at the same time. Whichever phone tree button got the most "votes" is where the call went.
The truly disgusting part of it all is they turned this into a competition. You could see your answer speed scores as you went through your shift. You were trying your best to direct a call before the other two people hearing the same clip as you. But if you were TOO quick on the draw and directed a call before the audio clip finished (and it was revealed the caller actually wanted something else at the last second), you were punished for rushing. FAST but not too fast. Those with higher scores on the honest-to-god leaderboard would get a slightly higher hourly wage for a given paycheck. Of course, this leaderboard constantly reset. There was no way to do well and then coast on a higher wage. You were fighting a bunch of other disgraced souls for the chance at maybe getting a few more scraps that week.
Humans crammed in a gray room getting carpal tunnel at lightning speed, all racing in the hopes of getting a bit more than minimum wage. You were listening to audio clips NON-STOP your entire shift. Rapid fire. Pain, suffering, torture, with no way to listen to music or look at your phone or talk to another human being.
And then you went home. Another day of a job well done, helping these massive corporations get a bit more wealth by talking up their cool "artificial intelligence".
I quit that job after a month. It really broke something inside me. When I walked up to the desk where the Computer Lab Warden sat, I just said "Hey I don't think I can do this anymore. I wanna quit." And no shit, the guy was like "Oh sure. Thanks for coming up to say something, most people just stop coming in one day."
I have to imagine every big innovation is like this.
