AI is here to help, and if not AI, some of these very sick, impoverished unemployed folks
Anyone been increasingly upset by the tone and content, the voice we might say, of recent commercials playing as part of March Madness? Two in particular have me really bent out of shape. Sometimes I think I’m just not hip enough to see the humor. I figure I’m getting old and just don’t get it. If I’m just too old and don’t get it, please explain it to me in the comments.
I. Door Dash: The commercial mimics two people on a dating app, asking “Are you available?” They both seem pretty ill, flu or cold or, god help us, Covid? A reason that should keep them BOTH inside. No, I want to say, they are not available, especially as it seems the man is asking the nose-drippy woman if she’s available (she is not just available, she’s freakin’ eager to meet his needs) to do something that requires going out, coming to his house, and finally, requires going to a drug store to get him meds. The final shot offers a kind of strange explanation for why she would go out and get the meds instead of him, since they both seem equally sick. The meds are for his son, now soothed and sleeping beside him on the couch. Thanks to this woman’s selfless behavior? I think thanks to her desperation, a desperation that would make her ignore her own needs and danger to make a few dollars running an errand for him. The scenario upsets me because A: he doesn’t have a healthy friend to run the errand for him in a pinch like this; and B: Is this ad celebrating a culture that preys on the most needy in our society, asking them to get up in the middle of the night even ignoring further risks to their own health (infecting others at the pharmacy? car accident driving around sick, including falling asleep at the wheel? compromising one’s health further with exposure to a chill or other factors?) just for a few bucks — because they are THAT desperate? This is a good way to build a service or economy that serves poor people, horrific jobs like these?
2. The second commercial is for an investment company or bank who we are supposed to embrace because they are making the future so much better with AI. Not scary. BETTER! A young woman is headed off to work but the HAL (think Space Odyssey) on her kitchen table locks the door. Cue scary music and face. Her AI has locked her in her apartment. Just what we all fear, right? The AI is in control. She tells it to open the door. It will not. Then it says, “Are you forgetting something?” As she scans her memory, her face brightens and she breaks into a big smile. “My energy drink!” Off to the smart refrigerator to grab one and put it in her backpack. Door unlocks and she thanks Hal for saving her having to maybe climb up 25 flights of stairs to come back for the drink or worse, missing her energy drink entirely, being drowsy, underperforming, getting fired, etc.
No, that last part is mine. The point is that this company that is so in touch with the future realizes that the future isn’t scary because all this AI is going to help us with meaningless, nonthreatening tasks. There is nothing to fear.
Except, maybe, the counterpart to this commercial, of a female basketball player training against an avatar. She criticizes the invented environment, but moreso criticizes how the training bot has been programmed — NOT SCARY. In other words, this human player is already scarier in how she plays willing to talk trash at the expense of another player’s feelings (who has feelings? Feelings are for losers), not threatened at all by this lame competitor. She seemed to be expecting Matrix-level training to really get her adrenaline up. The message again: We’re supposed to be afraid of this future? Lame. Maybe the only thing more frightening to me than the valueless, soulless world of these two commercials is that they seem to have been scrubbed from YouTube. I can’t find them online! Not remembering the company, I searched every search term I could think of, including whole catch phrases, descriptions, and the closest I got was Nerd Wallet ads.
3. Nerd Wallet: Yes. Let’s consider the message of a tenement filled with “us” only 50 years later, in 2074. Unlike those (we don’t see them or their world) who are streaming by in a world of leisure and luxury and health, those of us who made bad financial decisions now (presumably because we were too scared of risk) are working at age 102 with 25-year-old bosses in cramped apartments offering no vacations. Our lives suck. There are winners and losers, just like the bros told us there would be back in 2024, just like Nerd Wallet told us, and we didn’t make the necessary changes and take the necessary risks and make the financial decisions that would make us winners instead of losers. Cause there are only two types of people out here. There’s us, the losers. And there are the winners. And they don’t even talk to us anymore. They feed off the fruits of our labor.
Finally, I would like to highlight my post with links to the ads or even a still or two, but I can’t find them online, not even on YouTube. So I can’t find the investment-oriented company which I think would diminish the impact of their expensive advertisement.
