The self driving car analogy is a good one, because what happens when you trust the car enough to do most of your driving but it suddenly thrusts the controls upon you when it shits the bed and can't figure out what to do? You suddenly realise you've become a very rusty driver in a moment that requires fast recall of skill, but your car is already careening off a cliff while you have this realisation.

[The "children of the magenta line"](https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/sp/2015/05/msp2015050...) is a god explanation of this, and is partly why I often dissuade junior devs from pretty user friendly using tools that abstract away the logic beneath them.

This can and does end up with letters from collection agencies and debt collectors knocking on your door.

Unfortunately the dystopian levels incompetence of massive PLCs means it's often less hassle to quickly prove your correctness, regardless of things like burden of proof etc.

> I don't see what a company in that situation hopes they can accomplish

If you replace the word "company" in your sentence with "employee", do you come to a different conclusion?

A "company" is merely an amalgamation of the employees under it. When it comes to customer service you're often left feeling the impact of individual employees and the motivators that influence them. For example, metrics about times spent on calls, number of tickets worked on, new accounts created, resolutions that end in the company's favour etc.

You're absolutely right that Ovo energy has no legal basis to charge money to OP, and he would very likely win his dispute. But the _employee_ gets the ticket put in front of them and is heavily incentivised to close the ticket quickly and in the company's favour. The employee won't be the one going to court, and might not even be the person who picks the ticket up next when OP indignantly responds.

So if OP's meter number is as easily accessible as OP's address and the question for the employee quickly comes down to either: - Update OPs bill with the "correct" meter number. Meter number now matches address, bill is now valid. Submit response and bill. Move on to next ticket.

- Update ticket with "correct" address, send bill to other address. (new addressee may pay or may make same claim as OP). Submit response and send bill. Move on to next ticket.

The support employee doesn't know which option is actually the correct one unless they spend time digging into the issue to actually solve it well. But everything in the customer support world is almost always set up to disincentivise this. The result is the employee making the quickest choice that matches with their incentives of closing ticket and the company getting money.

Whether the employee acted rightly or wrongly doesn't really matter much, they're not the ones going to court over it. They might not even end up being reprimanded.

(If you can't tell I've been through the wringer on this multiple times and finding leverage to get the customer support employees to solve your case well is increasingly a nightmare.

Sorry for the long response).

You make a good point. Getting decent customer/tax payer service is becoming increasingly rare in the name of metrics/efficiency/profit.

I feel fortunate I did not yet have to deal with the particular brand of madness you describe.

I agree with you on this feeling like a sales pitch, probably because ultimately it is. I've done a software training course led by this guy. It was fine, and his style and his lessons are all pretty decent and I found/find myself agreeing with his "takes". But it's nothing ground breaking, and he's not really adding anything to the debate that I've not read before. I don't know how active he is as a developer, I assumed that he was more of a teacher of established practices than being on the cutting edge of development. That's not an insult, but it stands out to me in this article.

Ironically, like an LLM, this article feels like more like an amalgamation of plenty of other opinions on the growth of AI in the workplace rather than any original thoughts. There's not really anything "new" here, just putting together a load of existing opinions.

(I am not suggesting that Jason got an AI to write this article, though that would be funny).