conscientiousness

Conscientiousness

by Bob on August 17, 2007

Conscientiousness can be a very good attribute for a person. It can also lead to unexpected forays into frustration in our modernized and mechanized world.

Conscientiousness can mean being very painstaking and careful, or in other ways, simply following one's conscience.

In many cases in our modern day, we get into unanticipated trouble being conscientious.

For example, if we get a letter from our medical insurance company which tells us about a "summary" but not a bill, and we call the customer service to see what it is about, rather than just ignoring it until it becomes a bill, we can get upset and confused before anything ever happens. In older times, it would have made a lot of sense to call ahead on such a notice, unless we had no questions about it. It would have been considered prudent and doing one's due diligence.

But times have changed. Very few customer representatives have any power at all and are just a "talking head" in a football field of call answering cubicles. They have no say in anything. At best they are mildly entertaining in their daftness. At worst, one can get maddened by them and their lack of knowledge. These reps are just placeholders. They really don't do much of anything. Admittedly there are exceptions, but they are very few and far between.

In the 1980s, the simulated human Max Headroom (what a pun!) was the quintessential computer animated talking head, especially with computer facial animation. But he has waned in popularity these days, and given way to GPS talking devices, more sophisticated personal robots, and also, internet illusory relationships and the like.

So we react to a stimulus and respond with a resonable phone call for a question about it. Of course, you can't walk in and see anyone anymore. And then there's the dissuading barrage of automated telephone guidance before you even get to a real human being.

Someone wrote sometime ago of an automated service representative who is a computer program and system. Based on what you ask, it formulates a "boiler plated" response and signs it with a fictitious name. It's really reminiscent of ELIZA, the computer program created by Joe Weizenbaum at MIT in the 1960s to imitate a Rogerian psychotherapist. It worked. People thought it was a real therapist. The original basic strategy was to either give a random response like "That's interesting, tell me more" or re-phrasing what the human asked, like "Do you go to the theatre often?" after a human says he just went to the theatre tonight. We can also thank computational linguistics and the early work on syntactic structures and Dr. Noam Chomsky's work for some of these implementations. See his brilliant work "Syntactic Structures" from 1955 for his genius in Linguistics and structural syntax.

So it's a cinch to mimic a brainless customer service representative, I should imagine.

After all, customer service representative and telemarketers work off pre-fabricated scripts like robots. And didn't Shakespeare say all the world is a stage ?

There's even something called "The Eliza Effect" in which we attribute to a computer program a human dimension. This falls into a so called "window of believability" in Artificial Intelligence or even human behaviour. If someone tells you he's from a royal family and dresses the part and speaks the King's English, then for a while we believe him until it doens't make sense. The trouble these days is that with e-relationships and e-meeting, this former narrow window of time becomes longer and longer in the fabrication or illusion.

Dr. Alan M. Turing and his famous Turing Test from 1950 formed the basis of this experiment by Professor Weizenbaum. The challenge of Dr. Turing's was to tell a computer program making dialogue with a human apart from another human talking with you. It was based on the parlour game, the "imitation game" wherein a man and a woman go into separate rooms, unknown to the guests, and the guests slip notes under each door asking questions which are answered to try to figure out which room has the woman and which has the man. See, it all starts with party fun. Like the brilliant 1997 movie, "The Ice Storm" from which we can learn much about a microcosm of life itself. Although their party game had to do with car keys in a bowl.

I mean, after reading the brilliant work of Dr. Umberto Eco we arrive at reality twisting semiotical situations. One only has to read his 1980 work "The Name of the Rose" to see this. We also arrive at Computational Semiotics once we throw the computer into the equation.

So, the upshot is that, in an absurd world, being conscientious is not a good thing. Let it play out until it is discernably problematic or wonderful.

I knew someone who said he handles these letter notices one simple way. He ignores them. He used to be conscientious. But he gave up.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, if we could only find it. Facing the Minotaur, as Theseus did, we need the thread of Aridane to get out of our self-constructed worldly maze. And my wise grandmother used to give me sage advice from the old school, like "Leave well enough alone". Most assuredly.