I have no problem with calling a helpline from where I am in England and getting support from a woman in India. I might think about global supply chains, I might think about outsourcing and minimum wage, but I need to know something and she knows it, I can’t conceive of having a problem with her. And yet you know people do, because sometimes a support person like this will pretend to be in England and so talk about the weather. Or will insist that her name is Jeffrey.

When that happens, I feel embarrassed for my species. It’s like when you see a warning label that says your coffee may be hot: you know this fatuously obvious thing is there because some arsehole sued and probably won. So you also know that Jeffrey has had a bad time with callers from England and this weather chat stops some of it. Or when you — admittedly rarely now — get to meet someone in person like a hotel receptionist, there’s a decent chance that their nametag is wrong. They may well have just grabbed whatever name tag was on the desk and, again, you know that’s because there have been problems with customers before.

You can’t fault preventative measures, you can only lament a world in which such things are necessary.

But this is not necessary. Yesterday I had to use a chatbot to get a thing done and it was fine, it worked quickly, did the job, I was on and gone in under five minutes. Yet the majority of those five were spent waiting while this AI chatbot pretended to be human. You click the “Yes of bloody course I want a refund” and you get those Messages-style three dots showing the chatbot is thinking, then the reply “Are you sure you wouldn’t just like us to look after the money for you?” gets typed out as slowly as if by a one-finger typist.

You know there’s a lot of money behind that chatbot, you know there’s AI involved so the company has paid more than it needed to, and you also know that this pretend one-finger typist has replaced very many actual one-finger typists.

And then if you do the same thing but phoning up instead of typing in, you will now typically get a synthesised voice pausing while the sound effect of typing is played to you.

I don’t know when we became infants.