Time Magazine is investigating a healthcare telemarketing firm who has been using an amazingly realistic robot caller which seems to operate on advanced and a bit creepy artificial intelligence.
The Florida firm Premier Health Plans Inc. is responsible for “employee” Samantha West heard in the exchanges below. After cleverly filibustering, she repeatedly insists she’s a real person and not a robot.
Listen to the newest recording below:
With this level of advancement in customer service technology, how many more jobs can we expect to become automated out of existence?
America has very, very few consumer protections. What it does have is a system that let’s you waste your own valuable time and money trying to find the scammer so you can sue them, giving you at best a 50/50 chance of getting a judgment in your favor even when you have researched the law, gathered the facts, documented the evidence, and followed civil procedure. If you have any doubts about your time or ability to do it all on your own you have the right to pay fortunes to law firms, which will increase your odds to a 60/40 chance if you are in the right. If it is an election year, unless your case is generating a lot of public interest, the decisions from the lower courts will favor the businesses, even if the business is just a guy in a basement scamming people out of money. If you live in the South then it is even worse.
Now, after winning a judgment your odds of collecting any dollar amount are maybe 5 out of 95, unless you are running a collection agency that sues little old ladies by the boat load – those consumers who don’t know enough about the thousands of ways one can easily skirt ever paying a dime on any judgment.
Even most regulatory agencies have no teeth to enforce the law, but are stuck in the same position of suing for dollar amounts that often go uncollected. Some of the most dangerous mining companies in the US owe millions in fines and court judgments for numerous safety violations, but the regulatory agencies have no further legal authority to stop them.
This does not have to be the way it is. Consumer protection in Europe is largely based on regulatory agencies that directly go after violators without leaving the burden on the citizen to go to court. And unlike the US, consumer protections are just much more strict to protect the consumer. Corporate talking heads will tell you that this is bad and makes for a nanny state. You decide.