Logbook

Assignment #6

What will the impact be on people’s well-being and psychology if a large proportion of daily service will be delivered in a highly predictable and standardized manner without deviations from service scripts and without human touch

It is difficult to predict the impact in a society where all services are standardized and processed by robots. Some are in favour, thinking that most errors in the service sector are human errors, such as a car accident by a driver or a miscalculation by a chartered accountant. So, they think that by making all these services standardized by robots with artificial intelligence, there would be far fewer errors in the service sector and this would improve our society. But is this really the case? We are going to analyze some of the positive aspects of this standardization of services and then we will see the negative aspects, especially on human well-being.

The standardization of services in our society by artificial intelligence can in certain aspects be positive for our society. Indeed, as previously mentioned, there will be much less "human" errors because it will be robots that will process each request with predefined algorithms. Moreover, a service proposal standardized by artificial intelligence will increase productivity in certain sectors, for example faster answers for a company's customer service (so a larger number of requests can be processed), faster and more numerous taxis, customer advisers who would answer automatically, etc. One of the advantages of this automation also concerns machines compared to human errors. Indeed, in case of questions from a customer or uncertainties, an employee will be able to show annoyance or contempt for the customer who needs help. A machine will simply help the customer without any form of aggression, which has a positive impact on the customer's well-being. Another positive impact on people's well-being following automation of services concerns the randomness. Indeed, the quality of a service rendered can have a lot of variables: the mood of the provider, the situation of the company, etc. If a machine takes care of meeting people's needs, the service will be the same all the time, therefore linear in terms of quality. The customer will know what to expect when he buys a service, which can reassure him. We have therefore seen that automating services can be beneficial for customers because there will be more efficiency in the services rendered, as well as standardization of these services.

We will now see that too much automation can have a negative impact on the psychology of customers and can affect their well-being.

In a society where all services would be processed by robots, there would be no human interaction. This can have a huge impact on the well-being of customers, but also on the population. A cold society with a fully automated service sector has negative aspects. First, from a purely qualitative point of view: while it is true that a machine can meet a large number of demands, it is impossible for it to adapt on a case-by-case basis to the specific situation of each customer. This is highly problematic as adapting to customer needs is an essential feature in the service sector, for example in the health sector where proximity and trust in one's GP is very important.

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