My role in discussions of new technologies has been as an “anti-declinist”—a coinage of my own, a coinage that mostly has not caught on.

      Still, give me an example of any now-beloved or at least now-accepted technology, and I can cite right-thinking people at the time who were convinced it was evidence of ongoing decline, a step on the road to ruin. That includes, for instance, the printing press, which, Leo Tolstoy concluded near the end of War and Peace, was “Ignorance’s weapon.” So Tolstoy—apparently dismayed that a lot of crap was being printed—dismissed the printing press as “ignorance’s weapon” precisely at the moment when he was about to use it to give us War and Peace.

       Knowing this and having written about a couple of dozen other new technologies that were similarly disparaged, dismissed and even feared when they were young, I should be the last person to criticize a very new technology, a technology obviously still experiencing growing pains, a technology that will obviously significantly improve.

      But that’s what I’m going to do.

      For I really, really, really hate the technology known, I just learned, as Interactive Voice Response.

      Here’s what has turned me into a hater:   

      I am trying to add home insurance to my auto insurance policy—in part because the auto insurance people (the ones with the gecko) were so pleasant to deal with when someone sideswiped my car.

      No pleasant person this time. Mechanical voice. Computer-generated voice. Pure, unremitting, unrelenting Interactive Voice Response.

      Knows my name. Knows my car. Knows the address of my country house. Starts talking about car insurance, which I keep trying to explain, is not the subject of my call.

      And eventually, in response to my repeated pleas and demands, this Interactive Voice Response, manages the leap from auto insurance to home insurance.

      But it cannot process, so to speak, the fact that I am looking for insurance on two dwellings: in the country and in the city.

      I try to explain. I’m ignored, and the computer goes on about insurance for one house. No comprehension. No slot for information about a second home. It wants to give me a quote on insurance for the country house, only.

      I ask for a “representative.” Either not an option or I am not heard.

      Instead—shazam!—the Interactive Voice Response jumps all the way back to my car insurance. We are starting over from scratch!

      So we go through it again. Home insurance. It eventually understands. Two homes. It, once again, totally fails to understand. “I need to talk to a representative!” No representative is made available. Instead, the Interactive Voice Response again returns me to a discussion of my car insurance. We retrace this circle a few more times: car insurance, home insurance, country home. Start all over when second dwelling is insisted upon.

      “Ignorance’s weapon,” indeed!

      I finally emit a mournful: “Can I please talk to a human?” Not that I believe whatever I am in conversation with has any idea what a human is.

      No human manifests. Just more Interactive Voice Response; endless IVR; endlessly unable to help me, IVR; stubbornly, repeatedly and successfully chasing away my business IVR.

      And, yes, Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, IVR does look like another weapon in ignorance’s arsenal.

      I realize that Interactive Voice Response will keep improving. In the not-too-distant future, buttressed by larger and larger doses of artificial intelligence, the human-sounding voice on the phone will be able to figure out that I have two dwellings, indeed will be able to figure out whatever a human would have been able to figure out—probably more. And no human—and I guess this is a blessing—will have to spend time dealing on a phone with some guy looking to buy insurance for two homes.

      The day, in other words, will probably arrive when people will have as much difficulty understanding why someone would attack Interactive Voice Response as we have understanding why Tolstoy would attack writing.

      But today, having been trapped by a new technology in an endless idiocy loop, it became a little harder maintain my anti-declinist stance.