Someone, anyone, answer the damn phone!
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, April 4, 2026 – Just as slavery deprived residents of slave states entry-level jobs in the Plantation Economy, so too does AI deprive all Americans millions of entry-level jobs already taken by AI in the Consumer Economy.
When I was young, every professional, commercial, and governmental office hired people to answer telephones in order to help prospective patients, clients, customers, and citizens find answers to whatever question made them pick up the damn phone in the first place.
Today, because Big Tech knows how a bill becomes a law, millions of respectable, entry-level jobs have disappeared. Now, most non-personal phone calls trigger the same automated lie: “Please listen carefully as our menu has changed…”
Show of hands, please: who voted to replace receptionists with machines that are as ignorant of truth and good manners as some presidents are?
Please listen carefully: AL is the new slavery. The same human flaws that produced the Plantation Economy are at work today in the Consumer Economy, especially in the BigTech sector, where data-mining bots such as Alexa, Siri, and Google are deployed to increase human dependence on machines that not only lie, but also are subject to hallucinations!
And, since BigTech exercises so much control over America’s supine legislature, AI businesses are immune from prosecution, just like POTUS!
As the great Bob Marley and Peter Tosh put it – Get Up, Stand Up, Stand Up for your right(s). As the enigmatic Bob Dylan puts it, It’s Not Dark Yet, but it’s getting there.
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