Human_Fallback

The recruiter was a chipper woman with a master’s degree in English. Previously she had worked as an independent bookseller. “Your experience as an English grad student is ideal for this role,” she told me. The position was at a company that made artificial intelligence for real estate. They had developed a product called Brenda, a conversational AI that could answer questions about apartment listings. Brenda had been acquired by a larger company that made software for property managers, and now thousands of properties across the country had put her to work.

Brenda, the recruiter told me, was a sophisticated conversationalist, so fluent that most people who encountered her took her to be human. But like all conversational AIs, she had some shortcomings. She struggled with idioms and didn’t fare well with questions beyond the scope of real estate. To compensate for these flaws, the company was recruiting a team of employees they called the operators. The operators kept vigil over Brenda twenty-four hours a day. When Brenda went off script, an operator took over and emulated Brenda’s voice. Ideally, the customer on the other end would not realize the conversation had changed hands, or that they had even been chatting with a bot in the first place. Because Brenda used machine learning to improve her responses, she would pick up on the operators’ language patterns and gradually adopt them as her own. (...)

Many of the properties that used Brenda were similar in a way that unnerved me: blocky, polychrome behemoths located near transit hubs and composed entirely of glass and vinyl siding, their facades as flat as iPhone screens. There was something heedless about these constructions. They didn’t seem aware of what cities they were in. No matter the culture or the clime, there they were, with their keyless locks, pet spas, and smart appliances, each one like a candy-colored app icon the size of a monument. As I clicked through virtual tours, I encountered variations on the same minimalist fever dream: gray sectionals, gray laminate floors, a fiddle-leaf fig tree that cast no shadow. The kitchens had islands, the islands had barstools, the rugs looked like they had been drawn with the polygon tool in Microsoft Paint. I suspected that like Brenda herself, these images were hybrids, cobbled together from real and simulated elements.

I was intrigued by the property names. The older complexes imparted old-fashioned domestic comfort with gerunds and a grab bag of pastoral morphemes (The Crossing at Hillcrest, The Landings at Meadowood), while others conveyed prestige with manorial resonances (Foxchase, Hunt Club, Pheasant Run). The newer complexes, in contrast, had vaporous, nonmaterial names—Continuum, Prism, Vivo, Axiom, Radius, Verge, Spark, Spectra, Ascend—names I found more reminiscent of medical equipment than the tech products they were meant to suggest. Then there were names that spelled out the street address in an unusual way (One One Six, Off Broadway, 2900 On First), and names that incorporated the word Lofts. There were properties with human names (The Seymour, The Ashley) and names that sounded like brunch spots (Harper House, Palmer House, The Outpost). After hundreds of hours with Brenda, the names rattled around in my head like psychic junk. They cleaved apart and collided to form new chimeras. The Chimneys at Carriage Crossing, The Cradles at Crossing Pointe, Vitamin Lofts, The Ether, Parallelogram @ Prospect, Parq Malaise. Sometimes I would jolt awake at night, my heart racing, with no thought at all but Legacy Lofts on Main.

Who were these apartments for? They seemed tailored to a certain kind of tenant, a tenant surely derived from repeated focus groups. This tenant spent more time at work than at home, but when they were home, they were emphatically indoors. They had voice-controlled light switches and ice machines connected to the internet. At the end of the day, they pulled their luxury vehicles into underground garages, picked up their packages from the on-site Amazon Hub locker, ran in place at the fitness center, then ordered delivery from a restaurant endorsed by online reviews. In the same way that algorithms tell us what they think we want, and do so with such tenacity that the imagined wants become actual, these buildings seemed intent on shaping a tenant’s aspirations. They seemed to tell the tenant they should not care about regional particularities or the idea of a neighborhood. The tenant should not even desire a home in the traditional sense, with hand-me-down furniture, hand-built improvements, and layers of multigenerational memory. This tenant was a renter for life, whose workplace was their primary address, and who would nevertheless be unable to afford property for as long as they lived. No matter: their job might take them to Omaha one year and to El Paso the next, but they would always find a home just like this one, as frictionless as the internet, which means that it wasn’t a home somewhere, but everywhere, which was nowhere at all.

by Laura Preston, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: Rochelle Goldberg, Consent (detail). 2022; photo by Roberto Marossi

[ed. See also: Why Is Everything So Ugly? (N+1)]