This moment we’re in right now—where humans and bots find themselves in an unprecedented admixture—is one more step in the automation of different kinds of human labor. In the quiet, white-collar automation that swept the world in the last quarter of the 20th century, the messiness of human processes required many intermediate steps in the transition from paper and human to computer and computer. Much of what service work used to be was automated over the last few decades. Now, computers make the decisions, and the main role of the human is to deliver this information after pressing some keys on a computer.

Think of a car-rental counter. You’ve booked the reservation online, outfitting the car and contract exactly as you wanted to. That system has told the various workers what they need to get ready and issued the contract and rung up the total. The human involved has only one real job: to run the upsell script before you get in your car and go.

Of course, humans work around the design of the system. They tell jokes, shade competitors, hand out upgrades to people they like, dispense advice about the city, press their lips tightly when a customer says something stupid. But the system merely wants them to run the upsell script. That’s the job. They do the same thing over and over, under time pressure, acting with the grim knowledge that quantitative metrics will be the primary means by which their performance will be judged.

The playwright and author Barbara Garson captured many of these dynamics in a chapter on airline-reservation clerks in her 1988 anthropological study, The Electronic Sweatshop. Garson, encountering this as a new phenomenon, is aghast:

In a feat of standardization even more phenomenal than McDonald’s fry-vat computer, the airlines have found ways to break down human conversation into predictable modules that can be handled almost as routinely as a bolt or a burger.

She finds workers pushing to up their sales bookings and reduce their AHU (After Hang-Up) time stats. They are people who understand that the money they make is a direct result of their ability to hit the quantitative targets by which they are judged, no matter the human experience of the person on the other side of the telephone line. The skilled, long-term reservation agents who knew “all the company’s routes, fares, and policies” and could use that knowledge to help customers by understanding their needs were becoming obsolete. They didn’t know how to optimize themselves for this new, robotic world.

In the end, almost everyone lost their jobs anyway, as most travel booking moved to websites where the work was shifted onto customers who—now that the airline-reservation agents acted like robots—would much rather interact with a web form than have a phone call with a know-nothing trying desperately to sell them something in the shortest possible time.