Mr. Know-It-All: Is it OK For Me to Ask Customer Service Reps if They're Robots?

In, say, a customer service chat window, what’s the polite way to ask whether I’m talking to a human or a robot?

Back in June 2006, before any of us needed to worry about whether we were talking to a robot in our daily interactions, it was up to contemporary artists to make people feel vulnerable and confused. That month a friend invited me to see the preview of an exhibit by the artist Matthew Barney at a museum in San Francisco. (Barney is probably best known for making a series of films called the Cremaster Cycle, named after the muscle that raises and lowers the testes, and also for having a child with Björk.) Regarding the exhibit I’d been invited to, one critic wrote that, while everyone should go see the show, “no one should anticipate enjoying it.” Frankly, I didn’t enjoy it. Not being much of an art person, I didn’t even understand it. I remember a sprawl of chicken-scratch on a very high wall and a painfully slow film set on a surrealistic whaling vessel. And I remember something that happened that night, something that raised an equally disorienting set of questions about ethics, not aesthetics, that I’d like to try to unpack now, after all these years.

One room of the museum had been overtaken by a tangled, plasticized, 3-D form—a “sculpture,” I suppose you’d call it. We, the viewers, mingled at its edges, stepping around where its lowest tentacles reached the floor. I heard a deafening thwack. Everyone turned around. A man had collided with one particularly disordered region of the sculpture. People naturally began scanning for damage. But, given all the complexities of this great, bulbous sculpture, it was impossible to tell: Had some of those white bits broken off, or had they always been on the ground like that?

I’ll never forget the silence that filled that room, as though the air between us petrified into a solid. And then everyone turned away, pretending nothing had happened—just turned our backs on the guy, freezing him out and, no doubt, adding to his mortification. No one even had the courage to ask if he was OK.

That moment often comes back to me. It was a peculiarly fraught situation, which seemed to expose some latent discomfort around modern art—even there, at a modern art museum. Presumably everyone was trying to be polite—I know I was—but didn’t see an obvious or safe way to respond. And so, rather than risk impoliteness, we shut down; we turned away. And that wasn’t polite. I think it was cowardly.

I know what it’s like to wonder if the intelligence on the other side of the internet is artificial or human. It’s profoundly unnerving; I worry, on some level, that I’m being hoodwinked, which, I hate to say, is also how I feel when I look at some modern art. And I’m tempted to behave in ways—tersely, snidely, with a muted but unmistakable F.U. undertone—that I’d hate for an actual person, if it were an actual person, to have to endure.

What’s the polite way to ask if you’re talking to a robot? Well, I think it involves turning toward those feelings of vulnerability instead of away from them. It requires making some kind of confession, an admission of how perplexed and clumsy you feel, as a well-meaning person, sitting here in this chat window, nursing a potentially rude question about the entity on the other end. In short, it requires a gesture of our own humanity while asking for confirmation of theirs.

So, next time you squirm in one of those customer service chats, I suggest you take a moment to describe where you are and the disorientation you feel—I’m sitting at my kitchen table, fidgeting in front of my laptop because these interactions always make me uncomfortable—then simply say, “There’s no perfect way to ask this, but: Are you a human being? I sure hope so. Because I’m a human being, and I need some help.”

Write to [email protected].

This article appears in the October issue. Subscribe now.

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