[rpcorb]

Can confirm. I've noticed this social trend as well.

However, interestingly, there also seems to be critical threshold (different for every task) beyond which the opposite urge takes hold. Take, for instance, customer/technical support hotlines. The feeling of, "Please just let me talk to a human..." In that case there's a premium on the presence of human interaction. It almost seems like an "uncanny valley" of technological problem solving. In other words, machines are useful but usually brittle. Humans have a flexibility and creativity which won't be easy to replicate.

[glangdale]

Yes indeed. Unfortunately one often finds that you are talking to a human who is sitting on the same side of the "uncanny valley of technological problem solving as you". That is, some pleasant and would-be-helpful call center worker who is now just banging their head on the same problem you were. I've had more than a few calls where you can actually hear them getting stuck on the same web page, experiencing the same bug/timeout/whatever that you were getting on the 'public' site. Flexibility and creativity aren't much use when we're all just wrestling with the same brittle machine on the same terms...