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> Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work

by nirui 5y ago

> Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can't do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they're not really working. What they do doesn't compress like that. It depends. In China, the tech companies are testing AI telephone support. My banks uses it, JD.com uses it, China UNICOM use it. If you dial to those companies, an AI will take the call and guide you through the process, no human interaction needed. Not only that, some AI will even call you to schedule appointments etc. Another example is the supermarkets. Almost all supermarket in our city has deployed self-checkout stations, and some of them even laid off almost all but 1 or 2 of their checkout workers. I assume this trend will eventually expand to other labor types, so the workload of those workers will be lighten as result. (But of course, we can keep the load the same, but laid off unnecessary people instead, which is more likely if the government don't intervene)

Noos 5y ago
That doesn't change the principle though; the actual workers need to do 40 hours or even more; it just means there are less of them. And really, people need to be wary with automation. What people don't realize is that relying on it utterly paralyzes you when it goes down, because its a higher order fault than most staff need to handle. If the AI telephone support breaks during an update, you've just sidelined your entire operation. If you only have a few checkout employees, and your POS service needs to connect to the internet, and it goes down, you have virtually no one to reply to it. By reducing headcount you really run the risk of what were tolerant faults becoming critical. My own job has been running on a skeleton crew, and thank god one of us hasn't become sick or left yet. Eventually relying on automation and minimum staffing may bite you hard. A lot of retail stores would be up the creek if the store manager up and quit or was sick for multiple weeks.
- nirui 5y ago
  If we choose the "Good route", then companies can hire the same amount of people and those people can provide good service to the others while the majority of the service is handled by automated systems. For example, a road worker can now focus on fixing the part of the road which is more likely to be damaged, while the rest of the road is serviced by machines automatically. 4 hours later, the worker finished fixing the critical/difficult part of the road, then he/she go home to enjoy their life, the machine takes the rest of the routine to finish it off. But of course, more likely, we will go down the "Bad route". Workers will be fired, just like those in the supermarkets. And if machine fails, people will be re-routed to a "backup" -- a human or another machine, to be queued up for a even slower handling process. Few hours later, the machine is fixed, and the event is marked as one-time incident -- stability still above 99%, everything stay the same, except more workers will be fired due to redundant stability.

by nirui 5y ago

Noos 5y ago

That doesn't change the principle though; the actual workers need to do 40 hours or even more; it just means there are less of them. And really, people need to be wary with automation. What people don't realize is that relying on it utterly paralyzes you when it goes down, because its a higher order fault than most staff need to handle. If the AI telephone support breaks during an update, you've just sidelined your entire operation. If you only have a few checkout employees, and your POS service needs to connect to the internet, and it goes down, you have virtually no one to reply to it. By reducing headcount you really run the risk of what were tolerant faults becoming critical. My own job has been running on a skeleton crew, and thank god one of us hasn't become sick or left yet. Eventually relying on automation and minimum staffing may bite you hard. A lot of retail stores would be up the creek if the store manager up and quit or was sick for multiple weeks.

nirui 5y ago
If we choose the "Good route", then companies can hire the same amount of people and those people can provide good service to the others while the majority of the service is handled by automated systems. For example, a road worker can now focus on fixing the part of the road which is more likely to be damaged, while the rest of the road is serviced by machines automatically. 4 hours later, the worker finished fixing the critical/difficult part of the road, then he/she go home to enjoy their life, the machine takes the rest of the routine to finish it off. But of course, more likely, we will go down the "Bad route". Workers will be fired, just like those in the supermarkets. And if machine fails, people will be re-routed to a "backup" -- a human or another machine, to be queued up for a even slower handling process. Few hours later, the machine is fixed, and the event is marked as one-time incident -- stability still above 99%, everything stay the same, except more workers will be fired due to redundant stability.