AI's dead end: AI TV

I bought a TV. Not your regular TV. It is an AI TV. If you are wondering what's so special about this announcement, know that we didn't have TV at home for more than 15 years. No, I don't live in a cave without electricity. We did have a projector, but due to a home renovation, the easier way to enjoy entertainment was to buy a TV.

It is a story about AI and its proponents trying to cure all of humanity ills.

I bought the TV at the major electronics retailer known for its Geek Squad tech support team. I was always wondering if Geek Squad is the farm team for the Genius Bar crew, but that's beside the point. The buying experience was pleasant and before I knew it, my finance team aka. Visa facilitated the transaction. I was also told when the TV was going to be delivered and subsequently installed. As the scheduled days started coming closer, I started receiving emails, texts and phone calls. The most memorable call - automated, naturally - requested that the path from my driveway to my door is clear from any obstacles, namely ice and snow. It is August. Which part of the Northern Hemisphere where TVs are delivered currently battles snowstorms??

The day came and the delivery crew arrived with the TV, brought it in, and put it on the floor. I signed papers with an explicit checkmark that the box was delivered and was not opened. As the delivery people were leaving, they asked me to positively respond to the soon coming customer satisfaction survey with either 9 or 10. I had no reason to grade them with any other mark. Sure enough, a few minutes after they left I got an automated call asking me about my satisfaction with my delivery. I was asked - using my phone - to rate each aspect of the service on a scale from 0 (not happy at all) to 10 (super happy).

Hello survey people at Best Buy, have you ever seen a phone touch pad? Did you find it interesting that people either completely hate your service giving you only 1s or 0s, or at best only 9s? Suffice to say that one of the questions was if I was happy with the fact that the delivery crew opened the box and showed me that the TV is in good condition.

The next day, the Geek Squad arrived, unpacked the TV, connected to the power, configured the WiFi and everything was ready to go. Not so fast sparky. First there was a prompt to create an account with Samsung. First name, last name, postal code and date of birth!!! Naturally, I hit the 'skip' button. I don't need another account. I just want to watch TV. The next thing was to configure my Netflix account. Nice try. You can't do that without having a Samsung account ... Fine. I went to the Samsung webpage, entered letters and numbers and clicked a bunch of check boxes. The most amusing one - which was explicitly labeled as 'optional' and despite me not checking it - got automatically checked when you confirmed your last selection. I was agreeing to receive offers from Samsung which I could not pass on in good conscience.

Finally all was set up, tested and it was time to see the first movie. I went to Netflix ... and was told that I have to either register or confirm that it is my Netflix account - again. Unlike every other email from Netflix, this one was ending in my spam folder, which I found out once I was locked out of my Netflix account. A quick call and 10 minutes on hold to Netflix cleared the confusion. My account was reset and I was told to wait another hour before the change went through the system. After one hour I tried again and it worked. Harmony established in our family. The company which delivers movies on demand, asks you to wait an hour for a change to go through.

A few days later, as expected, I got my first marketing email from Samsung congratulating me on the recent purchase and giving me a never ending list of things I could purchase to make my experience truly exceptional. I scrolled to the bottom and found the 'unsubscribe' link buried in the fine print. Click ... and a message in my browser - the website you are trying to reach doesn't exist. Hunting for other links in the same email, I found out that the good marketing people at Samsung, misstyped the address. They missed a dot. Easy fix. I went to the un-subscribe page, clicked a button and I was done.

Despite the rumors online, I am trying to be a nice person and I replied to the email with the typo in the URL to let the marketing team know about the issue. The email bounced back with a note that the email can't be delivered after trying for 24 hours. Samsung will never know.

The good news in all this. I have an AI TV.

There was not one single moment where I thought that any of the issues would be solved or avoided with AI.

The recurrent pattern on all this? There is a thought out there that AI will solve all our problems and will replace our jobs. In order to do that, it has to learn from us first. That should scare you.