> I am not in love with the idea that the fate of AI is to boil down each person to a lowest common denominator. Are you kidding, that's the holy grail! When I

> I am not in love with the idea that the fate of AI is to boil down each person to a lowest common denominator. Are you kidding, that's the holy grail! When I need customer service I want every interaction to be by the book, zero personality, from them or from me. The problem is it's not right now: when somebody with a non-Western English accent answers a call to a Western company (Airbnb, your bank, etc) it's pretty much a guarantee that you're about to deal with massive incompetence and apathy. You don't notice this until you live long-term in a homogenous country, where the people answering customer service calls are the same people you see on the bus/train after work. It's like a lightning blast into your brain: "holy cow, customer service actually works here?". And you might say, "well incompetence and apathy is all call center people who work for American companies are empowered to give you, regardless of the accent or geography". But that's not true: Filipino/a call center employees are gushing with upbeat script-following good humor, but they never solve your problem. Whereas "Dave" from the midwest sighs and rolls his eyes before taking every call but he actually figures out the reason you're calling and uses his brain to try to resolve it, in the boundaries he's empowered within. That's not a popular thing to think or say, but I know I'm not the only one who, after literally hundreds of these interactions, has developed this heuristic. And you might say, "well 'Dave' from the midwest is by definition higher up the ladder and more empowered to solve your problem, because otherwise you'd be getting someone in the Philippines/India who's only allowed to follow their script". Sure. But that's why it'd be great if there was one common-denominator: anybody who answers your call has as much ability to resolve issues as anybody else, tries as hard as anybody else, communicates as clearly as anybody else... that's the holy grail.