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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 a

• 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.
      • lolinder 3y ago
        Depends a lot on the call center. I worked in technical support for a while, and while dealing with awful customers was awful, I did get to use my brain and creativity to solve problems and that was fun. I have family and friends who have worked in call centers where they have quite literally been selecting lines from a script to read off. That's a very different kind of experience, and it's the obvious type of job for AI to replace. Those family and friends might be stressed to have to find a new job, but they're not going to miss it for its own sake.
      • flangola7 3y ago
        No, it is degrading. Most soulless agonizing job I ever worked, would cry on my commute home on many days.
        • benjaminwootton 3y ago
          I would rather work in a call centre over factory work, food production, retail, cleaning etc. None of these jobs are fun, but millions of people have to do them.
          • colechristensen 3y ago
            I work in a kitchen on weekends for fun.
          • fakedang 3y ago
            I once did cleaning and groundskeeping for fun, back when my spine allowed it.
  • p-e-w 3y ago
    > People like the money they make more than the hassle of doing the job You're framing this like a choice, when for most people doing such jobs it absolutely isn't.
    • blululu 3y ago
      It is clear choice between bad alternatives. Unless you realistically think we’re going to make cash transfers a thing then this boils down to “better above ground in the rain than below in the dirt”.
• VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  People make more money working a shit job than they make when they're unemployed. People endure dehumanizing shit jobs because they have mouths to feed. Unemployment doesn't feed mouths. --- >Should these impossibly rote and dehumanizing kinds of jobs exist, or shouldn't they? It'd be nice if they didn't, but things just have to get done sometimes, rote, dehumanizing, or otherwise. I don't think bullshit jobs should exist, but people keep paying money to do them, and people who take these jobs do so because they have mouths to feed. I think callcenter jobs are bullshit jobs. But how else can people feed mouths? So many people, so few jobs, but so much to consoom, so we invent bullshit jobs for them, lest people stop consooming, god forbid.
  • SoftTalker 3y ago
    If the callcenter operators thought they were bullshit jobs, they would not be hiring people to work them. Callcenters make money, so on some sense they are not bullshit jobs. A bullshit job is more of a corporate office job that looks legitimate on the surface but the person does nothing of any value and the job really only exists because some manager didn't want to reduce his number of direct reports.
  • gmerc 3y ago
    This. Anyone who does not understand this needs to check privilege.
  • birdyrooster 3y ago
    If everyone listened to PC, there'd be no janitors because no one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.
  • bonniemuffin 3y ago
    It feels like we could cut out the middleman by giving people money for doing nothing, and letting the robots do the dehumanizing jobs. I'm not sure why people think it's morally superior to force people to do useless stuff to get the money.
• bugglebeetle 3y ago
  > Should these impossibly rote and dehumanizing kinds of jobs exist, or shouldn't they? The question that precede this one is “should we care for people’s basic needs like housing, healthcare, food, etc?” In America, the answer to that question is largely “no” from which all the dehumanizing work then follows. Many conversations about AI on this site seem, perhaps intentionally, to elude this reality. People aren’t angry at the prospect that these awful jobs will be taken away, but that their baseline survival will be made more difficult so that a handful of already wealthy people can get even more rich.
  • lucubratory 3y ago
    As a very smart man once said, "It took both time and experience before workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises those instruments." We've forgotten the lesson and we have to relearn it. The problem isn't AI - the problem is the owners of capital, who will be abusing and exploiting workers with or without AI. AI as technology is a wonderful achievement and the product of a great deal of proletarian intellectual labour, built on the intellectual labour of society as a whole - it is ours, and it is fantastic once we restore control to its rightful owners. Unemployment, homelessness, lack of healthcare aren't caused by AI, they're caused by an economic system which demands unemployment, homelessness, and which throws in the lack of healthcare for free. Accordingly, we cannot prevent unemployment by fighting AI - it has never worked in history and it won't work now, like fighting the mailman to "prevent" a court summons. We have to identify and fight the root cause, not the tools that both we and they use or will use.
• sbarre 3y ago
  I'll give a counter-point here. While I agree with a lot of what you said about the challenges of these roles, my company is actively providing opportunities for our call centre folks to access internal re-training programs (designed in collaboration with professional educational institutions) to bring them into junior development and product roles within the company, as we transition more and more to a self-serve model (and therefore need less and less call centre agents). Obviously this is not for everyone (our first cohort was 60 people and we had just over 1,000 applicants, out of which only about 30% met the qualifications). It's been a very successful first cohort in 2022-23 and one thing these re-trained folks bring to the table as transferable skills is a very clear understanding of the problems and shortcomings of our service offerings, having been at the "failure" end of many processes as you put it. As a result, many of them are very quickly contributing way more than a junior who is coming in straight from bootcamps or the outside, and are helping improve our products in meaningful ways that might have been hard, or expensive, to suss out by our existing product teams. So if these jobs didn't exist, we wouldn't have these smart humans coming into our teams with that real-world experience.
  • Avicebron 3y ago
    And that seems great that your company is doing that, but I'm not positive that is the norm. Also what happens to the 70% who "don't meet qualifications?" They now no longer have a job and have told they aren't able to succeed or advance
    • sbarre 3y ago
      This definitely isn't the norm, but hopefully we see it more as time goes on. Hiring good people is hard, and if you have folks in your organization who have been there a long time (the program is only open to employees who have been with the company for more than 5 years), then why not reward that loyalty with an opportunity to transform yourself at the same time as the business transforms itself? > what happens to the 70% who "don't meet qualifications?" They now no longer have a job and have told they aren't able to succeed or advance They stay in their current (unionized) job, and can still access other opportunities for advancement within the company, like they always have. We have a long and proven track record of promoting out of our call centres and into our business and management practices, this is just a specific program to help grow out digitization business. This isn't a "retrain or layoff" situation, sorry if that was somehow implied. Our company will continue to need call centre humans for many many years to come I suspect. We just need less of them. Also for anyone who is accepted into the re-training program, their job is secure until they choose to take a new role. At any point during the training program (which lasts about 16 weeks), they can go back to their old job if this isn't what they expected or wanted. They also continue to get their salary and benefits while they're in the full-time training program. The only commitment is that if they go through the full program and take on a new role, they need to stay in that role for 2 years or more, otherwise they have to re-pay a prorated amount for the training program (because we pay our training partner for each person who takes the program) based on how soon after the program they left.