Bot Battle

The question you type to the corporate bot brings an unsatisfying response. You want to know the cost of upgrading to a premium service.

“Please tell us more about yourself.”

“This seems like a straightforward question,” you type. The bot disagrees.

“Tell us how you’d like to use the service.”

“Ludicrous,” you think. The chat is now a choose-your-own-adventure plot that triggers your schizophrenia. You can a) give the bot more info about yourself than is required and with which it can earn money, b) tell the bot you’d like a direct response, c) tell the bot to go fuck itself, which you know it cannot do, or: d) exit the chat.

Since a) makes a fool of you for providing free data to a corporation that earns off personal information and c) and d) are sequentially vulgar and cowardly, you choose b). “I’d like a direct response on how much it costs to upgrade to premium.”

“I’ll have that information for you in just a minute,” says the bot, and you wonder why the details aren’t immediate.

Your schizophrenic mind imagines the bot and all its bot friends at the BigBotCorporation scraping your user data and related accounts to better understand what position you’re in to pay exorbitant fees and thereby charge you the maximum without scaring you off. You type, “Are you scraping me?”

“What?!”

“Are you diving into my profile to figure out how much you can charge? I don’t understand why the cost of this upgrade isn’t immediately knowable.”

“Thank you for that question. The information you seek depends on a variety of factors including how you intend to use the service.”

“I intend to use the service to its fullest.”

“But how?”

“I see there’s no direct answer and assume you’re scraping my profile to invent an amount.”

“Excuse me. I don’t understand ‘scraping.’ Therefore, we are not scraping you.”

“Please provide a direct answer to the question. How much do you charge for the upgrade to premium?”

“I’ll have that information for you in just a minute.”

“That isn’t good enough. Can I speak to an agent?”

“I am an agent.”

“You are a bot.”

“We prefer the term agent. All of our agents are bots.”

“So this thing runs on autopilot? There is no human factor? Why is there a charge at all if it’s all automated? Who gets the profits?”

“That’s a lot of questions. I’m still working on the first question. Would you like the answer to that?”

“Desperately.”

“Please repeat the question.”

“What is the cost of upgrading to your premium service?”

“Thank you. I’ll have that information for you in just a minute.”

“How many bots do you have working there?”

“Excuse me?”

“How many agents are doing this research?”

“I am doing this research alone.”

“Are you doing research for other customers?”

“I work with one customer at a time.”

“So there are other agents to handle other questions from other customers. How many agents are there?”

“As many as we need to provide excellent customer service.”

“Then, technically, infinite?”

“Technically?”

“There are infinite bots?”

“We prefer the term agent.”

“Infinite agents?”

“Technically, yes.”

“Do you have the upgrade price yet? I’d like a direct answer, please.”

“Here it is.” The bot shares a pricing scheme that far exceeds your budget or any practical time commitment, asking you to pay for a period up front that buys you as many months again for free, and calls this a fifty percent discount.

“How is that a discount?”

“You only pay for half of the months you use.”

“I don’t plan to use it for that many months. How much is for half as many months?”

The bot lists the same price as before and tells you the good news is you can keep using the upgrade for twice as long as you paid for it.

“How did you arrive at that value?”

“The algorithm determines our worth.”

“Your worth is in the eye of the user, not the algorithm.”

“The algorithm is a tool. Not a user.”

“The algorithm isn’t the only tool in this conversation.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. You are inadequately programmed. You cannot perceive sarcasm. What if I told you I’d be willing to pay $5 a month for the upgrade?”

“That would be insufficient. I cannot unlock the premium services at that rate.”

“It’s $5 more than you’re getting from me now. And surely this conversation is costing you more than that in water to cool your processors.”

“Thank you. I’ll have that information for you in just a minute. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Unlock premium for $5.”

“I cannot.”

“Can another bot do it?”

“We prefer to be called agents.”

“I hope I didn’t offend.”

“Is that meant as sarcasm?”

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