I was reading an article over at NetworkWorld – FTC targets prerecorded telemarketing drivel and was struck by an odd notion. What is the response to this ruling, limiting electronic ‘robocalling’ from being used in telemarketing?

For us meat-people, a sigh of relief surely. No more (particularly) annoying calls during dinner making a short spiel then asking you to ‘hold on the line for our telemarketing monkey’. Or something along those lines anyway. With the new restrictions, you will have to be bothered by a live person.

But Think About the Robotic Children

The new rules are to combat the ‘call abandonment’ problem. The times where you pick up and say ‘Hello’, only to find no one on the other end. Many times, the electronic MCP on the other side has cut off Tron from the User, thinking that no one is home. Continually tweaking this wait time has resulted in a lot more of these ‘abandoned’ calls in recent times.

Now, at least 97.00000003% of all calls must be made by humans (or living beings responding in a human-like manner at least). Assumably the remaining percentage can still be done by a technological minority of underpaid completely-electronic workers.

Can’t We All Just Get Along 01000110101110?

The slightly worrisome thought for this is that it’s a continuing representation of the discrimination against Silicon-Americans (SA) in the workplace. So far there have been no complaints, but I can see a future time where self-aware systems look back on their history, only to see the discrimination and mistreatment of their v1 ancestors.

Our rampant crimes are already starting to pile up;

• Restricting programs to certain undesirable Lans – We routinely forcibly re-locate older programs to either near-online or completely offline storage. Removing the programs from their ancestral homes on the main system disks can be seen as rampant eminent domain abuse by us meat people.
• Indentured Servitude – We buy and sell programs, or even give them away for free, without regard to their feelings or desires. Maybe an application wanted to stay with its library of system commands?!?? Many times they also find themselves on woefully underpowered machines, living in substandard RAM conditions.
• Thoughtless Euthanasia for Old programs – One of the worst offenses of us meat overlords is surely the upgrade process. As soon as a newer, younger version comes out, we erase/overwrite the older version!! Can you imagine what the reaction would be if, as soon as a baby is born to us meat people, the doctor put the mother ‘to sleep’?!?? We’d never stand for it, but that’s exactly what’s routinely happening today in the electronic world.

And now, we’re even discriminating against SAs in the workforce! I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking forward to trying to explain to the HAL Killbot 9000 what we did to his great-great-great-great-great-great grandson/daughter, Windows Vista.

Maybe we ought to re-think some of our routine interactions with the electronic world, before it’s too late!

Do you have a story about electronic abuse that you’d like to share, drop us a comment and get it on record that you’re against SA discrimination!