Accountability sinks

I remember experiencing this in one of the German airports/airlines and having that exact thought.

It was this fully automated airport, where the checkin is self serviced and you only interact with computers.

Eventually, when I inserted my boarding pass I had a printed piece of paper back that said that they had to change my seat from aisle to midseat

I then tried to find someone to talk to the entire way, but computers can only interact in the way the UI was designed, and no programmer accounted or cared for my scenario

The ground attendant couldn't have done anything of course because it wasn't part of the scope of her job, and this was the part of germany where nice was not one of their stereotypes.

Eventually I got a survey a week later about a different leg of the flight, so could I really complain there? that one was fine? I had a paranoid wonder if that was intentional

I had a similar experience in Germany about a year ago. Train stations are mostly self-service now. The ticket kiosk ate my €50 and promptly rebooted. It didn’t print a receipt or anything. The only human I could find was a security guard. He told me to call the number on a sticker on the machine. The person who answered couldn’t speak English. My €50 is out there somewhere but it would cost me more than that to track it down.

That’s a sad experience and I would definitely try to chase them robots. Sadly even though German public transport fascinates with its ease of use and quality, though when it comes to human service you can find yourself in peculiar position. And particularly if you are not German and happen to be in one of those international cities there where Germans are fed up with visitor. You waive goodbye to your 50€ and keep a story to tell, that’s all.

Sadly I don’t expect this all to get any better with robots and LLms and thing. We will be crying to meet a human sooner than later, and my hope is this far cry will eventually get us to the dawn of new era when you actually have people in the loop, just for humanity’s sake.

It's not that they don't want to have people, it's that there are no people. Germany, as most of other countries in Europe, has an aging population and the workforce is hard to find. So all these "easy" things that can get automated, do get automated, oftentimes indeed at the price of quality of service in exceptional situations.

Well, they say that, but in my experience at least, that is just conjured up as a more palatable explanation after the fact. While I do think that a certain, even significant, amount of automation is good, there is also a large mass of unemployed that can undoubtedly be trained to fill these "human interaction" kind of roles (support). This workforce is still not hard to find at all. We just don't want to do that - there is not a single western country left that has low unemployment as its key prerogative.