I’m planning to test this out for the month of October, using my ordinary life as the test case.
I’ve been wondering whether AI can help to redress the power imbalance between people and institutions by making it easier to raise concerns and to follow them through. There is in fact some research suggesting that AI can help people get better results when they complain to organisations.
These can be quite small things. Recently, I’ve used AI to pursue a refund from Just Eat, I’ve managed to get the Council to actually collect our food waste, and I’ve made what I hope is a useful complaint about the colonoscopy information from my local hospital. I’ve also started actually unsubscribing from those paper catalogues that arrive in the post and go straight in the bin.
AI has made all of these things manageable by showing me who to contact and helping to draft the messages. More importantly, it makes it much easier to keep going: to chase a response, work out who to contact next and escalate something when necessary.
If lots of people feel empowered by AI to make their views known then maybe all our efforts together could start to have an effect. It might be harder for organisations to maintain unhelpful, unfair or unlawful policies if people have the ability to escalate their concerns effectively.
A friend recently paid me a compliment when she described me as “casually making the world a better place whilst quietly going about your daily life.” Whether this is true or not, I’d certainly like it to be, so for the next month I’m going to consciously try it out.
During the month of October, I’m just going to live my ordinary life and whenever I come across something that seems wrong, I’m going to use AI to help me act on it and to keep pursuing it to a reasonable conclusion. I’ll try to keep a record of what I do and whether anything changes as a result. I won’t go looking for problems; I’ll just act on things that come up naturally as I get on with my life. Some things may already be in the pipeline as a result of actions I’ve taken during September, so I’ll record any escalation of those as well as new issues that may arise in October.
Maybe at the end of the month I won’t really have achieved anything. Maybe I’ll be able to see some results from my actions. It will be interesting to see what happens, and hopefully a fun experiment either way.
Is AI helping you to make your voice heard? Would you like to try it and see? Do comment below, and check back here at the end of the month to see how I got on.