The destruction of human agency

Interfacing with enormous soulless bureaucracies has become a regular feature of life in the modern world. Getting medical care, going to college, finding a job, and stopping that annoying recurring charge on your credit card from a forgotten subscription all require filing endless forms and interacting with automated systems or humans who are trained to behave like automated systems. We live in a world where the vast scale of human organization has made personal interaction impossible.

Bureaucratic organizations demand interchangeable actors and predictable outcomes so that they can operate at scale, but organic human exchanges are messy, chaotic, and tend to be shaped by the moral and cultural particulars of individual communities. This why our current ruling class seeks to create the rootless cosmopolitan individual, the universal man from nowhere who can be molded into anything. In the age of the mass man, learning to interact with bureaucracy becomes far more valuable than learning how to be human.

Anyone who has sought a redress of grievances from a major corporation has had the same experience. A woman with a thick Indian accent who claims to be named Susan takes the caller through an endless parade of inane questions before informing the customer that there is little to nothing that can be done. The call center worker has no agency or accountability; she is only allowed to answer from a prewritten script. The entire purpose of the charade is to grant the customer the illusion of interaction while ensuring that no unpredicted outcomes are possible.

Increasingly, this is not just the standard mode of interaction with customer service, but the only way a human will interface with the many different institutions that rule his life. Human resources, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Internal Revenue Service, health insurance providers, even dating apps. Every human interaction is mediated by a standardized process used to sort and categorize the individual, minimizing the amount of agency exerted by any single actor in the process.

We tend to understand intelligence as something particular to individual human beings, but a more abstract understanding is useful when trying to think about the modern world. In many ways bureaucratic organizations mimic an intelligent mind. In the beginning, these structures are established to serve a specific purpose, like making a company more profitable, but over time they respond to incentives that create divergent interests. Standardization maximizes the efficiency and reliability of the bureaucracy, but humans are not organically homogeneous, so as a mass organization becomes more effective, it also becomes less human.

New ways of thinking and interacting are developed to serve the efficiency of the organization instead of the human behaviors native to founders of that institution. Eventually, training humans to interact with bureaucracies becomes more effective than training bureaucracies to interact with humans, and a positive feedback loop for technocratic expansion is created.

Much ink has already been spilt over the question of whether artificial intelligence can really become a Skynet-style supercomputer that rules the world. I am no expert in the field, but it is hard to pretend that early iterations of the technology are not shaping the world around us. ChatGPT is a large language model used by many to generate all kinds of text. While it still has clear difficulty with creative endeavors like poetry or compelling fiction, the program is great at producing the kind of formulaic boilerplate favored by technocracies.

As human organization has become dominated by bureaucratic leviathans, employers have already been selecting for the ability to effectively navigate these Byzantine managerial structures. Instead of humans talking to other humans, bureaucracies talk to other bureaucracies through people who are trained to think like and to anticipate the needs of this form of artificial intelligence. While some people have perfected this skill, many others find it difficult and can use ChatGPT to generate the kind of response that bureaucratic organizations prefer.

The world of insurance provides the perfect practical example of this phenomenon. Insurance is the most infuriating form of bureaucratic structure, predicated entirely on making heartless and brutal calculations and attempting to deny benefits to as many of its customers as possible. Every interaction is meant to frustrate or confound the average person.

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