12 ms·

A call center worker’s battle with A.I.

121 points by elsewhen 3y ago

WirelessGigabit 3y ago
Any time I i have to call for assistance it's like pull pulling teeth. BofA has actually a nice system. I can hit 'call support' for from the app and there is a number added to the telephone number which icing identifies me. No need for me to searching various documentation. Oh, and the fake typing noises while the AI / robots is 'searching'... they drive me nuts. Like who are you trying to fool here.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  They're not trying to fool anybody, they're just trying to tell you that they're still there. It's the audio equivalent of a spinning cursor.
  - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
    But do they really need 5 seconds of fake typing to look me up?!?
    - godelski 3y ago
      If it takes 5 seconds to perform the procedure, then yeah. IDK how these systems work, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a explicit time delay added (like a second) to combat brute forcing. But come on, 5s isn't going to make or break your day. Chill with the instant gratification.
- silisili 3y ago
  Funny, I can think of only two companies who I don't mind calling, and they are both financial institutions as well. When did companies start treating customer interaction as a nuisance, a cost to cut, instead of an opportunity to build a stronger relationship and brand loyalty? I mean, CfA sells objectively higher priced foods(for fast food), and people will still wait in line for it, because they don't treat people as a nuisance, so there has to be something to said for the business model.
  - inemesitaffia 3y ago
    I think it might have started with Thiel. I read an article about PayPal being the first to actively avoid support
Animats 3y ago
The New York Times recently outsourced its sports section to The Athletic, a YC startup which the NYT now owns. 35 sports reporters will be "reassigned". It's partly union-busting - the NYT is unionized, but The Athletic is not.
- BigElephant 3y ago
  Not relevant here.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - voz_ 3y ago
    It absolutely is? They wrote this piece, and context matters because it can shed light many things, including hypocrisy. In this case, the commenter is pointing out just that.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  Didn't they retaliate against Wirecutter staff when they tried to go union, too? Half a billion dollars for a startup by two techbros, but the Times can't afford the cost of their employees unionizing? I guess I'm not in the least bit surprised then that every time I happen to click on an article from The Athletic out of boredom, it feels like something a freshman journalism major might write and then later be embarrassed about...and that every article I've read has been attributed to "The Athletic Staff." Sidenote: it always amazes me that in the US, you supposedly need permission from a complicated, slow federal bureaucracy to be "recognized" and thus protected from retaliation for actions.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    "...but the Times can't afford the cost of their employees unionizing?" It's not cost, it's control...
    - roadrunna 3y ago
elforce002 3y ago
Well, I don't like to call customer service but prefer that to a chatbot any day of the week. If I want to return something or let them know about some issues with my purchase, I'd like to talk to someone on the other side of the aisle. I'd hate to "talk" to a chatbot and waste time trying to get to a human representative. Heck, I highly doubt this would work for old people, angry people, etc... I could see a company selling its products with "100% human touch" as a marketing gimmick.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Current-gen customer service chatbots are pretty bad. But I could see something ChatGPT-level working in 95% of cases. Right now this doesn't work because of issues like prompt injection, difficulty of training on company data, etc. But I expect these limitations will be worked out over the next 5-10 years.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    But chat gpt has lied to me in almost every session I’ve had with it. How will that work when it promises hundreds or thousands of customers something it hallucinated?
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  I think that at least part of my dislike of chatbots is that they force you to navigate an often poorly thought out decision tree in order to try and accomplish something. When you talk to a human they're often navigating the same decision tree but they're acting as an interpretation layer to translate your natural language into the specific series of commands the machine they're working with will accept. It seems likely to me that an LLM would be able to provide that functionality.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Doesn't always matter that you're talking to a human. Like when you call Comcast with internet trouble, and you tell them you've already rebooted the router but they make you do it again anyway because that's the first step in their tree and they aren't allowed to skip it.
reaperducer 3y ago
Every time someone talks about how great AI is going to be for business, I ask "how?" The answer always boils down to greed. Every single time.
- epolanski 3y ago
  I'm not an AI enthusiast as many, but it's hard to deny the impact of ML in applications like copilot or Photoshop.
epolanski 3y ago
> “Am I training my replacement?” Yes, and it's not new. I know for a fact Google has been using QA specialist data results to train the AI at least since 2018. E.g. there used to be armies of people watching YouTube videos in search for policy breaking content, and essentially all they did with each report was to train the AI. A friend of mine who worked there used to tell me that there's tons of insane content being pushed on YouTube that you never get to see, such as children cartoons were at minute 24 there are random porn images or Hitler's speeches.
c0brac0bra 3y ago
In our line of business, our call center workers spend a significant portion (hours) of their time writing up notes and other information after calls. Having automated transcription and summarization (approved by the user) will return a ton of time to them and make them more efficient. And they could never be replaced, imo. The human impact in our sector is too important. A machine cannot, at least not yet, sympathize, joke, and persuade in the right balance, especially when the other party is emotionally agitated.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  > And they could never be replaced, imo. > A machine cannot, at least not yet I think we really need to get away from this idea that people can never be replaced. You've contradicted yourself with "at least not yet" two sentences later - that's not to criticize you, I think you're correct in the latter instance and doing something a lot of people do. They see the reasons that people can't be replaced now and just extrapolate that out to forever, while sort of handwaving away the fact that they realize that AI is rapidly improving. I think it's very clear that humans in these roles will be replaced in, say, 50 years. The question is how much sooner than that will it actually be - 20 years? 10? 5? 1-2?
  - kypro 3y ago
    > The human impact in our sector is too important. A machine cannot, at least not yet, sympathize, joke, and persuade in the right balance, especially when the other party is emotionally agitated. I'd also add that even the reasoning for why the human isn't replaceable here is debatable. I've never called a call centre for sympathy or jokes. It's always because I have a query I want an answer to or problem I want sorted ASAP. Assuming the benefit of an AI call centre would be that I wouldn't have to wait on hold, I'd rather have the AI centre than the inefficient human one. In scenarios where an AI can't easily deal with the query, then sure, I see why it would be good to have a sympathetic human who can take the call, but 90% of the time an AI would do just fine. I think this is what a lot of people get wrong about automation. Everyone likes to point out how their job has these one or two really difficult bits, while missing that 90% of the job is easy. As an example, here in the UK a lot of cashiers have now been replaced with self-checkouts, despite the fact we're still far from fully automating the cashier's job. We still need a couple of people on hand when there's security tags to remove or when someone needs IDing, etc. But that doesn't change the fact there's far fewer of them because 90% of the job can be automated.
sjducb 3y ago
If we want to live in a future utopia where the robots do all the work, then someone has to build the robots and design the AI. I think we need to explore post scarcity politics and economics to understand how we can support all of the people who lose their jobs. How to organize society when people don’t need to work is a political question, not a technical one. My favorite answers are Universal Basic Income and Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
elsewhen 3y ago
https://archive.is/7IF4T https://archive.is/7IF4T
splatzone 3y ago
If AI can replace abundant jobs in customer service, this will mean that the entry level becomes harder and harder for people to access. Because the work that's left for humans will become more skilled and complex - the stuff the machines can't deal with.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  Not all of them will be super complex. Everyone talks about how they don't know what new entry level jobs will open up when the AI automates everything. When the delivery drones come, someone is going to have to go and retrieve them when they break down, or get stuck in trees, or shot at by someone...
  - fatfingerd 3y ago
    Sure we already have that with scooter collectors.. If they keep working after VC money then the number of transport jobs they created are miniscule compared to the transportation they eliminated. Extreme poverty is nearing its end, globally, and with it this efficiency axiom will end too. As we get more efficient at delivering a reasonable quality of life with a lot less work the amount of labor needed decreases eliminating jobs which is a natural spiral. No longer is there a kind of global reservoir.
- CTDOCodebases 3y ago
  This is what I am wondering. The general entry path for IT (sysadmin) type jobs is get a front desk support job then start accumulating certifications. How is this going to that path? Or is AI erasing professions from the bottom up so no need for new workers into these professions?
  - staunton 3y ago
    > Or is AI erasing professions from the bottom up AI will be erasing professions starting from the middle. It's going to be a very interesting, unprecedented development. Two things are important: first, how much value the AI will create. Second, who will capture that value. Assuming it creates an amount of value commensurate with the number of jobs it replaces, the only important question is whether democracies survive the transition. If they do, people retain political power and use it to retain economic participation. If democracies fail, well...
swayvil 3y ago
Working in a call center is the worst. Pure torture. But that's common knowledge. It's strange to think that somebody would fight to keep that job. It illustrates the depths of the ubiquitous mindfuck under which we operate. I mean, what if the torture was replaced with a more obvious torture? What if you spent 8 hours a day getting your fingernails pulled out? At a good hourly rate and with nice benefits of course. Would we squeak?
- ilaksh 3y ago
  Read the article. The other job options for her were worse.
- xur17 3y ago
  Ms. Sherrod from the article seems to disagree with you here: > Within months of working at the casino, Ms. Sherrod felt the toll of the job on her body. Her knees ached, and her back thrummed with pain. She had to clean at least 16 rooms a day, fishing hair out of bathroom drains and rolling up dirty sheets. > When a friend told her about the jobs at AT&T, the opportunity seemed, to Ms. Sherrod, impossibly good. The call center was air-conditioned. She could sit all day and rest her knees. She took the call center’s application test twice, and on her second time she got an offer, in 2006, starting out making $9.41 an hour, up from around $7.75 at the casino.
- anonymousab 3y ago
  In many cases the only options are equally shitty or shittier jobs with worse pay.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  > I mean, what if the torture was replaced with a more obvious torture? Speaking as someone who worked in a call center for less than a month before quitting because I hated every second of it, having your fingernails pulled out seems a lot worse. I'd take the call center job. Another thing that's worse is being broke, I'd take the call center job over that too, if those were my only choices. I'm not sure about a ubiquitous mindfuck, but I know we operate under the need for food and shelter.
- 3y ago
gipp 3y ago
Why do articles like this never confront the paradox at play here: these sorts of jobs are notoriously awful and dehumanizing. Their existence is often looked at as a failure of our system, even in the very same publications that are now publishing these sorts of articles. I don't mean to minimize the problems that this (pardon the term) disruption causes, or the much more concrete and immediate fact of losing one's job. But if we're going to have that discourse don't we need to confront that central question? Should these impossibly rote and dehumanizing kinds of jobs exist, or shouldn't they?
- ilaksh 3y ago
  Read the article. It's actually way better than the jobs she had before. Sure it would be good for people to do jobs that are on the next level up in terms of complexity. However, AI is coming for those jobs also.
- shrubble 3y ago
  People like the money they make more than the hassle of doing the job; it's a great thing for people that work in the computers/tech field love what they are doing, but not every job is like that.
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    Everyone I knew who had a call center job was very happy to leave. Automation hasn’t led to fewer jobs it just leads to changed jobs. Unfortunate for those affected but we shouldn’t be holding up degrading mechanistic jobs as examples of what we should hold on to.
    - benjaminwootton 3y ago
      It’s quite priveledged to describe call centre work as degrading and mechanistic. It’s a bit boring but it’s clean, office based work where you get to use your brain. I would prefer to speak to a good call centre worker than email back and forth or filling in forms that go into black holes any day of the week.
xianshou 3y ago
Every facet of the article is designed to wring sympathy, but it's worth asking the real question: what is this advocating for? What kind of change (or stasis) would the author actually prefer to see? The existence of call-center work, which is intrinsically dehumanizing and unrelentingly laborious, is considered a failure of our society. The replacement or automation of that work, which creates displacement and impacts the livelihood of people who cannot adequately retrain, is considered a failure of our society. What, exactly, would constitute success?
- ramraj07 3y ago
  This is like complaining that a National Geographic documentary is too sympathetic towards Gazelles. Sometimes the documentary tries to show the plight of the cheetah too. You can totally elicit sympathy from someone while just showing the natural order of things and expecting no actionable change to come out of it. Moderated capitalism is a beautiful thing. It doesn’t last without good minded people keeping it in check but when it exists, it seems to work the best to improve the human condition. Call center jobs may look like shit to some but to the ones that got out of poverty through them they were heaven send. Now their era is coming to a close and we just have to see what the next natural order of things unfolds to be.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > which is intrinsically dehumanizing and unrelentingly laborious These jobs are dehumanising because of how some companies treat people. AI wont change that some enjoy dehumanising others. A change in attitude, forced by law or social change, would fix that. Now that would be a success.
  - 23B1 3y ago
    > A change in attitude, forced by law or social change, would fix that Presented this way it seems like AI would be the more frictionless option!
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    These jobs are not dehumanizing because of management. They are simply dehumanizing. If they were paid more, they would just be worth the dehumanization; getting hazard pay doesn't make a job less hazardous. > A change in attitude, forced by law or social change Exactly what would you like to force people to do? What's this "attitude," and by what process does it dehumanize people who work in call centers? Do call center workers have material problems, or is this a question of abstract mindset or aesthetics?
wildrhythms 3y ago
Working in a call center is terrible (I worked in one for 2 years), and any call center worker will tell you the ultimate goal should be to identify and solve the problems before the customer needs to call in, and empower the customer to solve the problem themselves (with requisite tools and documentation). Replacing the call center worker with an AI won't solve either of these things; in fact it probably makes the act of interacting with the support 'agent' worse in many ways; just another hurdle to customers getting help. And in some cases it is antithetical to the business interest to let the customers solve the problem themselves, example: cancelling your ISP plan. Some state(s) (notably California) enforce giving customers the option to cancel online[1]; but most of these companies demand customers call in and be subjected to a wait queue, and a pathetic, dehumanizing customer retention plea before they are 'granted' the cancellation. The tools to simply cancel an internet plan are actively withheld from the customer. Will an AI change anything about that? Probably not. [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/companies-must-let-customers-cancel-subscriptions-online-california-law-says/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/companies-mu...
- lolinder 3y ago
  The reason why the ultimate goal should be to solve the problems before the customer calls in is because of the amount of time wasted by both parties once things get that far. If an AI agent can reduce the time spent by both parties (no waiting on hold for the customer and no employee time for the company), then the goal is accomplished. For example, you call out documentation as something that needs to be improved so that customers can solve their own problems—what's wrong with that documentation taking the form of an interactive agent you can ask questions to? A well-trained chatbot (not raw GPT) has the potential to be much more useful for the kinds of queries that would otherwise end up at customer support than does a search engine on a bunch of docs.
  - me-vs-cat 3y ago
    > what's wrong with that documentation taking the form of an interactive agent Among many others, in no particular order: * (borrowing from above) The interactive agent can force you to sit through however many menus/questions the company wants until you are "granted" cancellation. Good luck finding the right option if they make it difficult to navigate! All the while, you have a condescendingly "friendly" "conversation". At least with a real person, I can convey my message clearly, and even if they must still read certain things, they will know to do so more quickly. Have you ever dealt with Amazon's chatbot, which shows the "typing" graphic for a few seconds before giving what is obviously generated text, and it takes a few back-and-forth exchanges like this before someone real introduces themself in the chat? * You can't quote it like you can actual documentation, which has knock-on effects such being harder to hold the company to account, not being able to give advice to friends & family, not being able to compare competitors before you open an account, ...
p-e-w 3y ago
The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment, so I have no doubt that those "lost" jobs will be immediately replaced by newly invented jobs, just to keep the whole thing going just a little longer. I'm quite certain that even the current generation of AI could already make 10-20% of first-world jobs obsolete, but of course those in power don't want that to happen. Not because of the poverty that would create, but because they don't want so many people having so much free time at their hands.
- nmz 3y ago
  Or they could go to war, to cull unnecessary humans, leaving a higher class with nothing but them and their servants, or I guess in this case, robot slaves.
- godelski 3y ago
  > I'm quite certain that even the current generation of AI could already make 10-20% of first-world jobs obsolete I often ask people how we could modify a economy to support 10% automation of the workforce. Where 10% of people are not only displaced, but that we do not gain an additional 10% of new jobs which could be filled by humans. The most reasonable answer I've ever gotten was jobs programs. But I don't think this actually solves things, and neither did that person. It's just a tax and prevents people from... being the most human they can be. It also prevents us from reaching post scarcity. Now I don't actually believe that 10% of jobs in Western countries could be replaced. There's 135m people employed in America and AI can't even replace the 2.4m janitorial staff that we have. AI isn't needed to replace the 3.8m retail staff (#1), 3.4m cashiers (#3), or 3.2m fastfood workers (#4), where the first two have already seen significant disruption and the latter is still unsolved since AI can't "flip burgers" good enough yet (yes, I know there are burger flipping robots, you're missing the point). But they still can't replace health care aids (#2), nurses (#5), or even movers (#8). I'd really encourage you to check out the most popular jobs[0] and ask yourself if you truly can disrupt them. Because if so, you should probably apply for a y-combinator seed round. Or AI just isn't as far as many people think it is. Replacing the one cashier and one person working the drive-through (both people multi-task btw) isn't going to significantly reduce the 8 people working during any given shift at a taco bell. [0] https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-largest-employment.aspx https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-larges...
ITB 3y ago
This is just the reality of the impending job displacement. Trying to prevent technology from advancing is not possible, and even if it was, it would limit everyone’s standard of living, which is undesirable. We have two big problems to solve. First is figuring out if we’ll need a safety net for the first wave of automated workers, or if more jobs will be quickly created. Second, which is more difficult, we need to make sure most people still have the purpose they derive from work. No matter how shitty a job might look from the outside, I wager most people still borrow a strong sense of identity from them. And if they lose that, shit will get weird. The whole concept of paying UBI to everyone so they become artists is complete BS. A lot of people will just be depressed or behave in a way that negatively impacts society. Jobs are a good way to keep social order. But telling sob stories about workers about to lose their job doesn’t solve any of these problems. It just makes people feel afraid of the future, which is counter productive.
- letrowekwel 3y ago
  Nope, most people don't borrow a strong sense of identity from their jobs. They just do them so they can afford to eat. With UBI they could actually choose to do something which gives them a sense of purpose and identity. Doesn't even have to be art. Personally I enjoy gardening and growing food much more than my job. With UBI I could fully concentrate on that, instead of wasting my time on stuff I don't enjoy. In fact it would be much more healthy for call-center workers to spend their time outdoors growing potatoes, instead of sitting indoors just to afford said potatoes. Lots of underpaid jobs like this are inherently unhealthy for humans.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    > most people don't borrow a strong sense of identity from their jobs Part of middle-class striver religion is that recognition for your labor is the only way to have an identity (or a "worth," both metaphorically and literally.) What you are in that worldview is exactly what the people who can pay think you are.
- xjaeekakappy11 3y ago
  [dead]
failuser 3y ago
Next step will be to finally make the demo of voice assistant calling support Google made a while ago real. Robots talk to robots to cancel subscription. In science fiction that would lead to AGI, but it will not.
svaha1728 3y ago
Not looking forward to having to jailbreak a chat bot on the phone just to force it to cancel my account.

121 points by elsewhen 3y ago

Any time I i have to call for assistance it's like pull pulling teeth. BofA has actually a nice system. I can hit 'call support' for from the app and there is a number added to the telephone number which icing identifies me. No need for me to searching various documentation. Oh, and the fake typing noises while the AI / robots is 'searching'... they drive me nuts. Like who are you trying to fool here.

Legend2440 3y ago
They're not trying to fool anybody, they're just trying to tell you that they're still there. It's the audio equivalent of a spinning cursor.
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  But do they really need 5 seconds of fake typing to look me up?!?
  - godelski 3y ago
    If it takes 5 seconds to perform the procedure, then yeah. IDK how these systems work, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a explicit time delay added (like a second) to combat brute forcing. But come on, 5s isn't going to make or break your day. Chill with the instant gratification.
silisili 3y ago
Funny, I can think of only two companies who I don't mind calling, and they are both financial institutions as well. When did companies start treating customer interaction as a nuisance, a cost to cut, instead of an opportunity to build a stronger relationship and brand loyalty? I mean, CfA sells objectively higher priced foods(for fast food), and people will still wait in line for it, because they don't treat people as a nuisance, so there has to be something to said for the business model.
- inemesitaffia 3y ago
  I think it might have started with Thiel. I read an article about PayPal being the first to actively avoid support

Animats 3y ago

The New York Times recently outsourced its sports section to The Athletic, a YC startup which the NYT now owns. 35 sports reporters will be "reassigned". It's partly union-busting - the NYT is unionized, but The Athletic is not.

BigElephant 3y ago
Not relevant here.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- voz_ 3y ago
  It absolutely is? They wrote this piece, and context matters because it can shed light many things, including hypocrisy. In this case, the commenter is pointing out just that.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
Didn't they retaliate against Wirecutter staff when they tried to go union, too? Half a billion dollars for a startup by two techbros, but the Times can't afford the cost of their employees unionizing? I guess I'm not in the least bit surprised then that every time I happen to click on an article from The Athletic out of boredom, it feels like something a freshman journalism major might write and then later be embarrassed about...and that every article I've read has been attributed to "The Athletic Staff." Sidenote: it always amazes me that in the US, you supposedly need permission from a complicated, slow federal bureaucracy to be "recognized" and thus protected from retaliation for actions.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "...but the Times can't afford the cost of their employees unionizing?" It's not cost, it's control...
  - roadrunna 3y ago

elforce002 3y ago

Well, I don't like to call customer service but prefer that to a chatbot any day of the week. If I want to return something or let them know about some issues with my purchase, I'd like to talk to someone on the other side of the aisle. I'd hate to "talk" to a chatbot and waste time trying to get to a human representative. Heck, I highly doubt this would work for old people, angry people, etc... I could see a company selling its products with "100% human touch" as a marketing gimmick.

Legend2440 3y ago
Current-gen customer service chatbots are pretty bad. But I could see something ChatGPT-level working in 95% of cases. Right now this doesn't work because of issues like prompt injection, difficulty of training on company data, etc. But I expect these limitations will be worked out over the next 5-10 years.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  But chat gpt has lied to me in almost every session I’ve had with it. How will that work when it promises hundreds or thousands of customers something it hallucinated?
CSMastermind 3y ago
I think that at least part of my dislike of chatbots is that they force you to navigate an often poorly thought out decision tree in order to try and accomplish something. When you talk to a human they're often navigating the same decision tree but they're acting as an interpretation layer to translate your natural language into the specific series of commands the machine they're working with will accept. It seems likely to me that an LLM would be able to provide that functionality.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Doesn't always matter that you're talking to a human. Like when you call Comcast with internet trouble, and you tell them you've already rebooted the router but they make you do it again anyway because that's the first step in their tree and they aren't allowed to skip it.

reaperducer 3y ago

Every time someone talks about how great AI is going to be for business, I ask "how?" The answer always boils down to greed. Every single time.

epolanski 3y ago
I'm not an AI enthusiast as many, but it's hard to deny the impact of ML in applications like copilot or Photoshop.

epolanski 3y ago

> “Am I training my replacement?” Yes, and it's not new. I know for a fact Google has been using QA specialist data results to train the AI at least since 2018. E.g. there used to be armies of people watching YouTube videos in search for policy breaking content, and essentially all they did with each report was to train the AI. A friend of mine who worked there used to tell me that there's tons of insane content being pushed on YouTube that you never get to see, such as children cartoons were at minute 24 there are random porn images or Hitler's speeches.

c0brac0bra 3y ago

In our line of business, our call center workers spend a significant portion (hours) of their time writing up notes and other information after calls. Having automated transcription and summarization (approved by the user) will return a ton of time to them and make them more efficient. And they could never be replaced, imo. The human impact in our sector is too important. A machine cannot, at least not yet, sympathize, joke, and persuade in the right balance, especially when the other party is emotionally agitated.

idopmstuff 3y ago
> And they could never be replaced, imo. > A machine cannot, at least not yet I think we really need to get away from this idea that people can never be replaced. You've contradicted yourself with "at least not yet" two sentences later - that's not to criticize you, I think you're correct in the latter instance and doing something a lot of people do. They see the reasons that people can't be replaced now and just extrapolate that out to forever, while sort of handwaving away the fact that they realize that AI is rapidly improving. I think it's very clear that humans in these roles will be replaced in, say, 50 years. The question is how much sooner than that will it actually be - 20 years? 10? 5? 1-2?
- kypro 3y ago
  > The human impact in our sector is too important. A machine cannot, at least not yet, sympathize, joke, and persuade in the right balance, especially when the other party is emotionally agitated. I'd also add that even the reasoning for why the human isn't replaceable here is debatable. I've never called a call centre for sympathy or jokes. It's always because I have a query I want an answer to or problem I want sorted ASAP. Assuming the benefit of an AI call centre would be that I wouldn't have to wait on hold, I'd rather have the AI centre than the inefficient human one. In scenarios where an AI can't easily deal with the query, then sure, I see why it would be good to have a sympathetic human who can take the call, but 90% of the time an AI would do just fine. I think this is what a lot of people get wrong about automation. Everyone likes to point out how their job has these one or two really difficult bits, while missing that 90% of the job is easy. As an example, here in the UK a lot of cashiers have now been replaced with self-checkouts, despite the fact we're still far from fully automating the cashier's job. We still need a couple of people on hand when there's security tags to remove or when someone needs IDing, etc. But that doesn't change the fact there's far fewer of them because 90% of the job can be automated.

sjducb 3y ago

If we want to live in a future utopia where the robots do all the work, then someone has to build the robots and design the AI. I think we need to explore post scarcity politics and economics to understand how we can support all of the people who lose their jobs. How to organize society when people don’t need to work is a political question, not a technical one. My favorite answers are Universal Basic Income and Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

elsewhen 3y ago

https://archive.is/7IF4T https://archive.is/7IF4T

splatzone 3y ago

If AI can replace abundant jobs in customer service, this will mean that the entry level becomes harder and harder for people to access. Because the work that's left for humans will become more skilled and complex - the stuff the machines can't deal with.

JimtheCoder 3y ago
Not all of them will be super complex. Everyone talks about how they don't know what new entry level jobs will open up when the AI automates everything. When the delivery drones come, someone is going to have to go and retrieve them when they break down, or get stuck in trees, or shot at by someone...
- fatfingerd 3y ago
  Sure we already have that with scooter collectors.. If they keep working after VC money then the number of transport jobs they created are miniscule compared to the transportation they eliminated. Extreme poverty is nearing its end, globally, and with it this efficiency axiom will end too. As we get more efficient at delivering a reasonable quality of life with a lot less work the amount of labor needed decreases eliminating jobs which is a natural spiral. No longer is there a kind of global reservoir.
CTDOCodebases 3y ago
This is what I am wondering. The general entry path for IT (sysadmin) type jobs is get a front desk support job then start accumulating certifications. How is this going to that path? Or is AI erasing professions from the bottom up so no need for new workers into these professions?
- staunton 3y ago
  > Or is AI erasing professions from the bottom up AI will be erasing professions starting from the middle. It's going to be a very interesting, unprecedented development. Two things are important: first, how much value the AI will create. Second, who will capture that value. Assuming it creates an amount of value commensurate with the number of jobs it replaces, the only important question is whether democracies survive the transition. If they do, people retain political power and use it to retain economic participation. If democracies fail, well...

swayvil 3y ago

Working in a call center is the worst. Pure torture. But that's common knowledge. It's strange to think that somebody would fight to keep that job. It illustrates the depths of the ubiquitous mindfuck under which we operate. I mean, what if the torture was replaced with a more obvious torture? What if you spent 8 hours a day getting your fingernails pulled out? At a good hourly rate and with nice benefits of course. Would we squeak?

ilaksh 3y ago
Read the article. The other job options for her were worse.
xur17 3y ago
Ms. Sherrod from the article seems to disagree with you here: > Within months of working at the casino, Ms. Sherrod felt the toll of the job on her body. Her knees ached, and her back thrummed with pain. She had to clean at least 16 rooms a day, fishing hair out of bathroom drains and rolling up dirty sheets. > When a friend told her about the jobs at AT&T, the opportunity seemed, to Ms. Sherrod, impossibly good. The call center was air-conditioned. She could sit all day and rest her knees. She took the call center’s application test twice, and on her second time she got an offer, in 2006, starting out making $9.41 an hour, up from around $7.75 at the casino.
anonymousab 3y ago
In many cases the only options are equally shitty or shittier jobs with worse pay.
karaterobot 3y ago
> I mean, what if the torture was replaced with a more obvious torture? Speaking as someone who worked in a call center for less than a month before quitting because I hated every second of it, having your fingernails pulled out seems a lot worse. I'd take the call center job. Another thing that's worse is being broke, I'd take the call center job over that too, if those were my only choices. I'm not sure about a ubiquitous mindfuck, but I know we operate under the need for food and shelter.
3y ago

gipp 3y ago

Why do articles like this never confront the paradox at play here: these sorts of jobs are notoriously awful and dehumanizing. Their existence is often looked at as a failure of our system, even in the very same publications that are now publishing these sorts of articles. I don't mean to minimize the problems that this (pardon the term) disruption causes, or the much more concrete and immediate fact of losing one's job. But if we're going to have that discourse don't we need to confront that central question? Should these impossibly rote and dehumanizing kinds of jobs exist, or shouldn't they?

ilaksh 3y ago
Read the article. It's actually way better than the jobs she had before. Sure it would be good for people to do jobs that are on the next level up in terms of complexity. However, AI is coming for those jobs also.
shrubble 3y ago
People like the money they make more than the hassle of doing the job; it's a great thing for people that work in the computers/tech field love what they are doing, but not every job is like that.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  Everyone I knew who had a call center job was very happy to leave. Automation hasn’t led to fewer jobs it just leads to changed jobs. Unfortunate for those affected but we shouldn’t be holding up degrading mechanistic jobs as examples of what we should hold on to.
  - benjaminwootton 3y ago
    It’s quite priveledged to describe call centre work as degrading and mechanistic. It’s a bit boring but it’s clean, office based work where you get to use your brain. I would prefer to speak to a good call centre worker than email back and forth or filling in forms that go into black holes any day of the week.

xianshou 3y ago

Every facet of the article is designed to wring sympathy, but it's worth asking the real question: what is this advocating for? What kind of change (or stasis) would the author actually prefer to see? The existence of call-center work, which is intrinsically dehumanizing and unrelentingly laborious, is considered a failure of our society. The replacement or automation of that work, which creates displacement and impacts the livelihood of people who cannot adequately retrain, is considered a failure of our society. What, exactly, would constitute success?

ramraj07 3y ago
This is like complaining that a National Geographic documentary is too sympathetic towards Gazelles. Sometimes the documentary tries to show the plight of the cheetah too. You can totally elicit sympathy from someone while just showing the natural order of things and expecting no actionable change to come out of it. Moderated capitalism is a beautiful thing. It doesn’t last without good minded people keeping it in check but when it exists, it seems to work the best to improve the human condition. Call center jobs may look like shit to some but to the ones that got out of poverty through them they were heaven send. Now their era is coming to a close and we just have to see what the next natural order of things unfolds to be.
gumballindie 3y ago
> which is intrinsically dehumanizing and unrelentingly laborious These jobs are dehumanising because of how some companies treat people. AI wont change that some enjoy dehumanising others. A change in attitude, forced by law or social change, would fix that. Now that would be a success.
- 23B1 3y ago
  > A change in attitude, forced by law or social change, would fix that Presented this way it seems like AI would be the more frictionless option!
- pessimizer 3y ago
  These jobs are not dehumanizing because of management. They are simply dehumanizing. If they were paid more, they would just be worth the dehumanization; getting hazard pay doesn't make a job less hazardous. > A change in attitude, forced by law or social change Exactly what would you like to force people to do? What's this "attitude," and by what process does it dehumanize people who work in call centers? Do call center workers have material problems, or is this a question of abstract mindset or aesthetics?

wildrhythms 3y ago

Working in a call center is terrible (I worked in one for 2 years), and any call center worker will tell you the ultimate goal should be to identify and solve the problems before the customer needs to call in, and empower the customer to solve the problem themselves (with requisite tools and documentation). Replacing the call center worker with an AI won't solve either of these things; in fact it probably makes the act of interacting with the support 'agent' worse in many ways; just another hurdle to customers getting help. And in some cases it is antithetical to the business interest to let the customers solve the problem themselves, example: cancelling your ISP plan. Some state(s) (notably California) enforce giving customers the option to cancel online[1]; but most of these companies demand customers call in and be subjected to a wait queue, and a pathetic, dehumanizing customer retention plea before they are 'granted' the cancellation. The tools to simply cancel an internet plan are actively withheld from the customer. Will an AI change anything about that? Probably not. [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/companies-must-let-customers-cancel-subscriptions-online-california-law-says/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/companies-mu...

lolinder 3y ago
The reason why the ultimate goal should be to solve the problems before the customer calls in is because of the amount of time wasted by both parties once things get that far. If an AI agent can reduce the time spent by both parties (no waiting on hold for the customer and no employee time for the company), then the goal is accomplished. For example, you call out documentation as something that needs to be improved so that customers can solve their own problems—what's wrong with that documentation taking the form of an interactive agent you can ask questions to? A well-trained chatbot (not raw GPT) has the potential to be much more useful for the kinds of queries that would otherwise end up at customer support than does a search engine on a bunch of docs.
- me-vs-cat 3y ago
  > what's wrong with that documentation taking the form of an interactive agent Among many others, in no particular order: * (borrowing from above) The interactive agent can force you to sit through however many menus/questions the company wants until you are "granted" cancellation. Good luck finding the right option if they make it difficult to navigate! All the while, you have a condescendingly "friendly" "conversation". At least with a real person, I can convey my message clearly, and even if they must still read certain things, they will know to do so more quickly. Have you ever dealt with Amazon's chatbot, which shows the "typing" graphic for a few seconds before giving what is obviously generated text, and it takes a few back-and-forth exchanges like this before someone real introduces themself in the chat? * You can't quote it like you can actual documentation, which has knock-on effects such being harder to hold the company to account, not being able to give advice to friends & family, not being able to compare competitors before you open an account, ...

p-e-w 3y ago

The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment, so I have no doubt that those "lost" jobs will be immediately replaced by newly invented jobs, just to keep the whole thing going just a little longer. I'm quite certain that even the current generation of AI could already make 10-20% of first-world jobs obsolete, but of course those in power don't want that to happen. Not because of the poverty that would create, but because they don't want so many people having so much free time at their hands.

nmz 3y ago
Or they could go to war, to cull unnecessary humans, leaving a higher class with nothing but them and their servants, or I guess in this case, robot slaves.
godelski 3y ago
> I'm quite certain that even the current generation of AI could already make 10-20% of first-world jobs obsolete I often ask people how we could modify a economy to support 10% automation of the workforce. Where 10% of people are not only displaced, but that we do not gain an additional 10% of new jobs which could be filled by humans. The most reasonable answer I've ever gotten was jobs programs. But I don't think this actually solves things, and neither did that person. It's just a tax and prevents people from... being the most human they can be. It also prevents us from reaching post scarcity. Now I don't actually believe that 10% of jobs in Western countries could be replaced. There's 135m people employed in America and AI can't even replace the 2.4m janitorial staff that we have. AI isn't needed to replace the 3.8m retail staff (#1), 3.4m cashiers (#3), or 3.2m fastfood workers (#4), where the first two have already seen significant disruption and the latter is still unsolved since AI can't "flip burgers" good enough yet (yes, I know there are burger flipping robots, you're missing the point). But they still can't replace health care aids (#2), nurses (#5), or even movers (#8). I'd really encourage you to check out the most popular jobs[0] and ask yourself if you truly can disrupt them. Because if so, you should probably apply for a y-combinator seed round. Or AI just isn't as far as many people think it is. Replacing the one cashier and one person working the drive-through (both people multi-task btw) isn't going to significantly reduce the 8 people working during any given shift at a taco bell. [0] https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-largest-employment.aspx https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-larges...

ITB 3y ago

This is just the reality of the impending job displacement. Trying to prevent technology from advancing is not possible, and even if it was, it would limit everyone’s standard of living, which is undesirable. We have two big problems to solve. First is figuring out if we’ll need a safety net for the first wave of automated workers, or if more jobs will be quickly created. Second, which is more difficult, we need to make sure most people still have the purpose they derive from work. No matter how shitty a job might look from the outside, I wager most people still borrow a strong sense of identity from them. And if they lose that, shit will get weird. The whole concept of paying UBI to everyone so they become artists is complete BS. A lot of people will just be depressed or behave in a way that negatively impacts society. Jobs are a good way to keep social order. But telling sob stories about workers about to lose their job doesn’t solve any of these problems. It just makes people feel afraid of the future, which is counter productive.

letrowekwel 3y ago
Nope, most people don't borrow a strong sense of identity from their jobs. They just do them so they can afford to eat. With UBI they could actually choose to do something which gives them a sense of purpose and identity. Doesn't even have to be art. Personally I enjoy gardening and growing food much more than my job. With UBI I could fully concentrate on that, instead of wasting my time on stuff I don't enjoy. In fact it would be much more healthy for call-center workers to spend their time outdoors growing potatoes, instead of sitting indoors just to afford said potatoes. Lots of underpaid jobs like this are inherently unhealthy for humans.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > most people don't borrow a strong sense of identity from their jobs Part of middle-class striver religion is that recognition for your labor is the only way to have an identity (or a "worth," both metaphorically and literally.) What you are in that worldview is exactly what the people who can pay think you are.
xjaeekakappy11 3y ago
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failuser 3y ago

Next step will be to finally make the demo of voice assistant calling support Google made a while ago real. Robots talk to robots to cancel subscription. In science fiction that would lead to AGI, but it will not.

svaha1728 3y ago

Not looking forward to having to jailbreak a chat bot on the phone just to force it to cancel my account.