"I used to need about half a day per month to handle my personal business. That amount of time has tripled, mainly due to the skyrocketing degree of ineptitude on the other side of these transactions. AI receptionists, unwanted apps and other substitutes for human interaction have made everything worse. You can't refill a prescription if the AI receptionist doesn't recognize the name of the medication. It's getting harder and harder to get an actual person - someone capable of exercising judgment -"
"These nonhuman services use enormous amounts of water and energy to process information, furthering the aridification of a West already locked in perpetual drought amid a rapidly accelerating climate crisis. If you've wondered, Why on earth are we doing this? you're not alone. Whose time is this supposedly saving? Whose jobs are being eliminated? Whose futures are we stealing as we hand over control to the computers?"
"The story package at the heart of this issue, a partnership with ProPublica, was produced by two journalists, Mark Olalde and Jimmy Tobias, who spent more than a year investigating the public-lands ranching programs run by the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service, asking who benefits, who profits, and how much damage is being done. They filed more than 100 public records requests and sued the BLM to obtain its data. That's how journalism gets done, day by day."
Personal administrative tasks have become far more time-consuming because AI receptionists, unwanted apps, and other substitutes for human interaction fail to exercise judgment and impede transactions. Automated systems often cannot recognize medication names or connect callers to decision-capable humans. Nonhuman services use enormous water and energy to process information, worsening aridification and climate stress in the West. Automated aggregation can substitute unreliable AI-generated answers for verified reporting, undermining journalistic quality. A year-long investigation into public-lands ranching required extensive records requests and litigation to obtain BLM data. Local journalism sometimes uses AI transcription, but full reliance on AI for reporting is rejected.
Read at High Country News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]