Crushing Life with Agents

It started innocently enough. It usually does. I get an email from Turkish Airlines every couple of years. I have miles, a pitiful amount of miles compared to most, but goddamnit, they are my miles and I will not lose them come hell or high water.

I then go on and spend nearly two hours, with two different phones, two different SIMS from two different countries trying to change my address. If I don’t do this, I lose the points. The points, the points, the points. All of this for these damn points which will in the end be worth a €4 IKEA gift card if I’m extremely lucky. I then called customer support who are not allowed to do anything which may or may not be true.

There is a 90% chance you’ve been in this situation.

How is this situation, this Kafkaesque theatre of digital process toilet swirl we’ve all encountered countless times in our modern lives, going to be helped by AI you ask? The companies we battle for the points they owe us put us into these downward spirals of doom until we give up. This is how they use AI. But how would AI help regular folks like you and I as it’s promised to? How is it going to take this drudge and sludge from our tired hands and weary eyes? I think I have it figured out:

1. I create an agent which has access to my details, blood type, my very life force, phone number and email address. I call it Agent Jim.
2. Agent Jim creates other AI agents just like itself to overwhelm Turkish Airlines support staff with sweet talk, cajoling, bribes and threats until one of them breaks and caves in to our hive mind Jim’s demands.
3. Simultaneously, another set of research agents trawl through LinkedIn and the Web to find a real person who works in support at Turkish Airlines in support. These agents then construct and unleash a Turkish speaking agent Jim.
4. Turkish Agent Jim then goes on to convince hapless telephone support agent Furkan that Turkish Agent Jim is in fact his long lost cousin and desperately in need of a favour. Furkan simultaneously gets an email from his boss who was subjected to a similar agent sting operation. The agent cartel targets Furkan’s mother who then orders Furkan do whatever he wants, which is of course changing my phone number.

The entire operation would take about three weeks, melt part of a glacier, cost tens of thousands and result in me now getting an €4 IKEA gift card. This, friends, is the techno-utopian dream we’ve all been promised finally realised.