7 ms·

I don't understand why everyone (excluding people who were replaced) is so "outraged".

nvr219 3y ago
As a customer: because the quality of service I get from a robot is much worse than the quality of service I get from a human being, in general.
- wussboy 3y ago
  Agreed. I called because I need a human to fix my problem. If it could have been fixed on the website I would have fixed it there.
- yreg 3y ago
  Have you as a customer interacted with LLM that replaced a human role? I don't think experience with pre-LLM chatbots is relevant here.
loghi65 3y ago
[dead]
indy 3y ago
Exactly, almost everyone who reads Hacker News have built their careers on technological progress. Outrage now that it's coming after their jobs just rings hollow.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago
  I built careers on making labour easier, I want the result of that labour to benefit the workers, not the exceptionally short term vision of shareholders. Just because you can't understand why this affects your future doesn't mean it's hollow outrage.
  - indy 3y ago
    If you think that AI only benefits shareholders then you're the one with exceptional short term vision. Broadening access to AI will massively benefit all humans
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - alluro2 3y ago
      In the socioeconomic utopia we'll build in the meantime?
      - indy 3y ago
        In the fact that AI is the only realistic path we have of providing every human being on the planet with the best health care and education.
        pacifika 3y ago
        Are we not solving that with this whole web thing?
        alpaca128 3y ago
        Technical solutions for societal issues don't have the best track record. Providing healthcare and education to everyone needs the right incentives, not technology that could theoretically help if greed spontaneously ceased to exist.
        reducesuffering 3y ago
        Your healthcare depends mostly on a solid foundation of technology. Otherwise everyone can have full access to all the witch doctors.
        alpaca128 3y ago
- muskmusk 3y ago
  I agree :) 7-10 years ago people on this forum thought they were invincible. People who said said software work would be commoditized were ridiculed. Rate of change is just fast and probably lots of people just thought that a career in tech was a free golden ticket for life. Now that it is threatened people are getting anxious and defensive. The vast majority of bad things happening in the world are okay as long as they don't happen to "me". Living conditions in sub Saharan Africa are really poor, but noone cares. We are all hypocrites to some degree.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  First they said #LearnToCode when the robots came for the factory workers, for I am a programmer and my job is safe Then they said #learntocode when the robots came for the cashier and bank teller, for I am a programmer and my job is safe Now that the robot is learning to code it seem they no longer desire progress
- emporas 3y ago
  New jobs are possible however. Given the state of A.I. even today, which is not that advanced, we need one terabyte per day or per week for training purposes. Someone has to produce that data and combine human made data with machine generated data. Synthetic data like that will be fed into ML algorithms. That simple process, in my calculations, will be the biggest industry on the planet by 2030. The data has to grow 1000x every three years or so. So this industry will end unemployment worldwide, for every person on the planet and also all ages.
  - data-ottawa 3y ago
    Does that mean jobs or filling a captcha to get a food stamp? I don’t see how that provides any employment.
    - emporas 3y ago
      As soon as A.I. is used for serious applications like self driving cars, then data have to be audited by humans. Human judgment is irreplaceable. These machines are statistical algorithms anyway, so even with the best data possible, they will err occasionally. So we combine two or three of them and average the result given some score, for even better accuracy. But data is the foundation of everything in their function. The transformation of data -> information is always done by humans. Given better and better statistical algorithms, that gap will become smaller and smaller, but automation will never be able to produce information by itself. Other serious applications include medicine and doctors. How about building houses out of epoxy and graphene walls, weighing 10 kg every house and stacking 10000 houses on top of one another? I.e. skyscrapers the size of Everest? Don't we need some serious data and A.I. architecture for the construction to stand tall?
krainboltgreene 3y ago
Because people want to work and there's money to pay them to work and the "AI" shit is dramatically worse. This is a net negative for everyone except the shareholders and even then that's only in the short term! If you saw someone shooting up in an alley with a smile on their face, you wouldn't be upset with others who are concerned with that person's future. Why do you care here?
- the_only_law 3y ago
  > Why do you care here? It’s a disingenuous question to stroke the ego of the GP and deride those “outraged”. Either that or GP is just dumb. If they were truly interested in why people are outraged, they simply could have read the numerous comments before theirs (regardless of whether they agree the concerns in those comments are valid or not, it would answer the stated question)
jarjoura 3y ago
What is the response you expect from everyone? Americans were replaced with off-shore call centers last decade. Now they're replaced with AI. Both are equally shitty because there's a very real human cost here. I certainly don't feel good about building technology that puts anyone out of a job like that. Maybe that person was working there as a means to pay for school to get a better job, and now has to find other work. Meanwhile, the leadership of Shopify gets to horde more wealth making it also feel pretty greedy to me. So I can see how, at least some significant share of people, would be "outraged" by that.
- mike_hock 3y ago
  And you lose quality of service with each move like this. Generic call centers serving a myriad of companies are completely useless to the customer, just read off a script and can't fix anything. AI is essentially the same.
  - indy 3y ago
    "read off a script and can't fix anything" has been a hallmark of customer service for the past 20 years. If anything, the shift to AI offers a path away from this and towards offering actually useful feedback. Would anyone whose been keeping up with LLM progress be surprised if within the next 3 years all AI powered call centers are significantly more useful than all of the current call centers?
    - data-ottawa 3y ago
      AI can answer questions cheaper, but can it address real problems? I worked at Shopify when it was much smaller, it was fairly common for support staff to reach out with questions for the product team which drive fixing bugs or improving features. How can the AI chatbot fill that role? It’s a gap that offshoring/disintegrating support creates.
      - indy 3y ago
        Yes, the AI chatbot will fill that role. It will answer questions that customers have and then it will feedback to the product team about the most common queries made by customers. Honestly, the Hacker News crowd have been such visionaries about the potential for technology but as soon as that technology infringes upon their livelihood they develop these massive blind spots.
jrflowers 3y ago
[flagged]
maxbond 3y ago
> I don't understand why everyone (excluding people who were replaced) is so "outraged". I think once you've applied the label "outrage" it's very difficult to see what people's concerns are and why. It adds this moral component, where only some people are entitled to be outraged (eg the people you identified as having understandable reasons) and thus by implication everyone else is throwing an unnecessary tantrum. I think that actually obscures what's going on. I think it's worth resisting applying the label of "outrage," and it becomes easier after that to hear people's concerns and evaluate their merits. Because they don't have to reach the artificial goalpost to justify outrage, they just have to be valid concerns.

As a customer: because the quality of service I get from a robot is much worse than the quality of service I get from a human being, in general.

wussboy 3y ago
Agreed. I called because I need a human to fix my problem. If it could have been fixed on the website I would have fixed it there.
yreg 3y ago
Have you as a customer interacted with LLM that replaced a human role? I don't think experience with pre-LLM chatbots is relevant here.

loghi65 3y ago

[dead]

indy 3y ago

Exactly, almost everyone who reads Hacker News have built their careers on technological progress. Outrage now that it's coming after their jobs just rings hollow.

krainboltgreene 3y ago
I built careers on making labour easier, I want the result of that labour to benefit the workers, not the exceptionally short term vision of shareholders. Just because you can't understand why this affects your future doesn't mean it's hollow outrage.
- indy 3y ago
  If you think that AI only benefits shareholders then you're the one with exceptional short term vision. Broadening access to AI will massively benefit all humans
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - alluro2 3y ago
    In the socioeconomic utopia we'll build in the meantime?
    - indy 3y ago
      In the fact that AI is the only realistic path we have of providing every human being on the planet with the best health care and education.
      - pacifika 3y ago
        Are we not solving that with this whole web thing?
      - alpaca128 3y ago
        Technical solutions for societal issues don't have the best track record. Providing healthcare and education to everyone needs the right incentives, not technology that could theoretically help if greed spontaneously ceased to exist.
        reducesuffering 3y ago
        Your healthcare depends mostly on a solid foundation of technology. Otherwise everyone can have full access to all the witch doctors.
        alpaca128 3y ago
muskmusk 3y ago
I agree :) 7-10 years ago people on this forum thought they were invincible. People who said said software work would be commoditized were ridiculed. Rate of change is just fast and probably lots of people just thought that a career in tech was a free golden ticket for life. Now that it is threatened people are getting anxious and defensive. The vast majority of bad things happening in the world are okay as long as they don't happen to "me". Living conditions in sub Saharan Africa are really poor, but noone cares. We are all hypocrites to some degree.
phpisthebest 3y ago
First they said #LearnToCode when the robots came for the factory workers, for I am a programmer and my job is safe Then they said #learntocode when the robots came for the cashier and bank teller, for I am a programmer and my job is safe Now that the robot is learning to code it seem they no longer desire progress
emporas 3y ago
New jobs are possible however. Given the state of A.I. even today, which is not that advanced, we need one terabyte per day or per week for training purposes. Someone has to produce that data and combine human made data with machine generated data. Synthetic data like that will be fed into ML algorithms. That simple process, in my calculations, will be the biggest industry on the planet by 2030. The data has to grow 1000x every three years or so. So this industry will end unemployment worldwide, for every person on the planet and also all ages.
- data-ottawa 3y ago
  Does that mean jobs or filling a captcha to get a food stamp? I don’t see how that provides any employment.
  - emporas 3y ago
    As soon as A.I. is used for serious applications like self driving cars, then data have to be audited by humans. Human judgment is irreplaceable. These machines are statistical algorithms anyway, so even with the best data possible, they will err occasionally. So we combine two or three of them and average the result given some score, for even better accuracy. But data is the foundation of everything in their function. The transformation of data -> information is always done by humans. Given better and better statistical algorithms, that gap will become smaller and smaller, but automation will never be able to produce information by itself. Other serious applications include medicine and doctors. How about building houses out of epoxy and graphene walls, weighing 10 kg every house and stacking 10000 houses on top of one another? I.e. skyscrapers the size of Everest? Don't we need some serious data and A.I. architecture for the construction to stand tall?

krainboltgreene 3y ago

Because people want to work and there's money to pay them to work and the "AI" shit is dramatically worse. This is a net negative for everyone except the shareholders and even then that's only in the short term! If you saw someone shooting up in an alley with a smile on their face, you wouldn't be upset with others who are concerned with that person's future. Why do you care here?

the_only_law 3y ago
> Why do you care here? It’s a disingenuous question to stroke the ego of the GP and deride those “outraged”. Either that or GP is just dumb. If they were truly interested in why people are outraged, they simply could have read the numerous comments before theirs (regardless of whether they agree the concerns in those comments are valid or not, it would answer the stated question)

jarjoura 3y ago

What is the response you expect from everyone? Americans were replaced with off-shore call centers last decade. Now they're replaced with AI. Both are equally shitty because there's a very real human cost here. I certainly don't feel good about building technology that puts anyone out of a job like that. Maybe that person was working there as a means to pay for school to get a better job, and now has to find other work. Meanwhile, the leadership of Shopify gets to horde more wealth making it also feel pretty greedy to me. So I can see how, at least some significant share of people, would be "outraged" by that.

mike_hock 3y ago
And you lose quality of service with each move like this. Generic call centers serving a myriad of companies are completely useless to the customer, just read off a script and can't fix anything. AI is essentially the same.
- indy 3y ago
  "read off a script and can't fix anything" has been a hallmark of customer service for the past 20 years. If anything, the shift to AI offers a path away from this and towards offering actually useful feedback. Would anyone whose been keeping up with LLM progress be surprised if within the next 3 years all AI powered call centers are significantly more useful than all of the current call centers?
  - data-ottawa 3y ago
    AI can answer questions cheaper, but can it address real problems? I worked at Shopify when it was much smaller, it was fairly common for support staff to reach out with questions for the product team which drive fixing bugs or improving features. How can the AI chatbot fill that role? It’s a gap that offshoring/disintegrating support creates.
    - indy 3y ago
      Yes, the AI chatbot will fill that role. It will answer questions that customers have and then it will feedback to the product team about the most common queries made by customers. Honestly, the Hacker News crowd have been such visionaries about the potential for technology but as soon as that technology infringes upon their livelihood they develop these massive blind spots.

jrflowers 3y ago

[flagged]

maxbond 3y ago

> I don't understand why everyone (excluding people who were replaced) is so "outraged". I think once you've applied the label "outrage" it's very difficult to see what people's concerns are and why. It adds this moral component, where only some people are entitled to be outraged (eg the people you identified as having understandable reasons) and thus by implication everyone else is throwing an unnecessary tantrum. I think that actually obscures what's going on. I think it's worth resisting applying the label of "outrage," and it becomes easier after that to hear people's concerns and evaluate their merits. Because they don't have to reach the artificial goalpost to justify outrage, they just have to be valid concerns.