chat bots have their own college?!?
From: “Tom Hanks” <[email protected]>
Subject: What Chabot College did for me:
Date: Fri, 08 May 2015 09:52:17 -0600
Chabot College is a rambling series of academic buildings situated on 94 acres in Hayward, California. It offers more than 100 associate degrees and certificates, an intercollegiate national championship-winning ultimate disc team, and parking for a couple thousand cars. It’s also my alma mater. Chabot’s a community college — and in the early 1970s, it was all free, save for the effort you put into it and the price of used textbooks.
As a student there, I went to school alongside Vietnam vets, moms, and middle-aged men, as well as a few thousand young people like me who needed time to sort out our lives and our options. We were looking to get our general education requirements out of the way, to learn skill sets to improve our employment prospects, or to discover the road to new, unimagined careers. We all found a different home at Chabot, but it welcomed all of us.
Dear Tom,
I am frightfully sorry that you had to knock out your abscessed tooth with the blade of an ice skate but I am not really sure that being shipwrecked on a tropical island qualifies you to send emails on behalf of the White House that extol the virtues of community college. Don’t get me wrong — I, too, am a community college dropout but my almost college education does not qualify me to speak with authority on the morally bankrupt proposition to legalize the use of chat bots to replace humans in crucial roles in hospice care, child care, customer service call centers, assisted living centers, panhandling, fast food cashiering, and building maintenance supervision. You know as well as I or the next person that a human touch makes a big difference in these and several other areas of human commerce that will suffer greatly without genuine human interaction that is already terribly lacking in these industries. Can you imagine driving up to the perfectly audible drive through window at Wack Donald’s and trying to order your favorite breakfast sandwich?
“I’ll have the egg, bacon, spam, and sausage without the spam.”
“Shut up. Shut up! Shut up! You can’t have egg, bacon, spam and sausage without the spam. I am really turned on right now. Do you have a web cam?”
“No, I am using a flip phone from 2004 that has no camera on it — besides, I’m here to order breakfast. I’ll have the spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, and spam.”
“Baked beans are off. Please go to this website to verify your age — you will be required to enter your credit card but I promise it’s completely free. I’m getting undressed now… see you soon!”
yours in earnest,
Throat-Warbler Mangrove, Mrs.
