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Anyone who works in AI, especially very closely with models, will tell you that it's not capable of really replacing any jobs yet. All these jobs being "replac

Anyone who works in AI, especially very closely with models, will tell you that it's not capable of really replacing any jobs yet. All these jobs being "replaced by AI" are simply being eliminated with the consequences of them being eliminated ignored. Customer service jobs aren't being replaced by AI, companies, like Klarna, are just giving up on customer service and using AI to increase their perceived value rather than reducing it.

rblatz 3y ago
It's not an all or nothing situation you can put an AI agent in front of real agents, if the AI agent is able to answer the customers question you do not need to escalate to a real human. That could allow 10 humans to now do the job of say 20. Did AI replace those 10 jobs, I'd argue yes.
- roland35 3y ago
  Yes, exactly like how a sewing machine helped replace sewers. One person can do the job of 2.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > Did AI replace those 10 jobs, I'd argue yes. Did it, or is it like the automated elevator? The automated elevator didn't reduce the number of elevator operators, it substantially increased the number of elevator operators.
ilamont 3y ago
Amazon and others already claim they use AI to handle customer support and marketing copy (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/how-amazon-uses-generative-ai https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/how-am...). Air Canada got burned when an AI chatbot made a mistake (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39378235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39378235). Legal firms have been fined for hallucinated precedent citations (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491510). The technology is clearly flawed. Regardless, a lower cost option (AI) is replacing a higher priced option (human labor). Ten years ago these tasks would have been handled by human employees or specialists. There is certainly a history of this in the corporate world, when expensive union labor in Detroit is replaced by lower cost workers in Mississippi, manufacturing experts are forced to train their replacements in lower-cost countries, or entire engineering and customer service departments are shifted overseas.
- Tagbert 3y ago
  We use some AI for the first level of customer support. It can provide standard answers to common questions and help with routine action requests, but it is backed up by human operators for anything more complex and customers can opt out of the AI whenever they want. From customer surveys, they tend to like using the AI for simple things because it is faster and they get what they need. The like that they can get a human when they need too. If you aren't providing a human fallback, you aren't doing it right.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    Bingo, and that's the part of AI that I think is overlooked. It might kill some jobs, but it'll never kill an entire sector like the web killed travel agencies. And the thing is, the more the risk the less likely an LLM is going to be trusted to just make a decision. For example, do you think an insurance agency would want an LLM to decide, on it's own, claim approvals? Can you imagine the headache for the insurance agency if the LLM approves the wrong claims or denies the wrong claims? Or for a doctors office, Imagine AI diagnostics without a human. Can you imagine the headache for a hospital when an AI misses cancer? Or diagnoses a false cancer? It's bad enough when humans get that wrong, but now you have to explain to your legal team "We just left up the practice to the stats gods!"
    - notpachet 3y ago
      Can you imagine a lawyer using ChatGPT to draft legal briefs and find relevant case histories? Well...
    - mattgreenrocks 3y ago
      > For example, do you think an insurance agency would want an LLM to decide, on it's own, claim approvals? Can you imagine the headache for the insurance agency if the LLM approves the wrong claims or denies the wrong claims? You say this, but I sometimes worry that these issues are hand-waved away by decision-makers with, "oh we'll just have another LLM doing frontline claim support to verify these issues." It's the whole XML/violence thing, where the solution to XML-induced pain often ends up being more XML.
bregma 3y ago
I suspect the closer you are to the models the farther you are from the decision making.
pavlov 3y ago
And the idea of giving up on customer service isn't anything new. Google and Meta have been extremely successful with this approach. AI is just an excuse for others to follow suit.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  Google and Meta have great customer support for the advertisers that spend loads of money with them.
ponector 3y ago
That is not true. Jobs have been already replaced, even before chatgpt. Customer support team of 10 is replaced with chatbot and 2 people. Half of the jobs will be replaced with AI soon. Writers? No need to have huge team, one senior is enough. Developers? Lawyers? Illustrators? Lay off half and replace them with AI tools!
- PheonixPharts 3y ago
  > Customer support team of 10 is replaced with chatbot and 2 people. My experience, having grown up when all customer service reps were people, is exactly what I stated above: this is just giving up on customer service. Anyone who has ever called automated support knows this. When you reduce 10 people to 2 people and some chatbots now you simply have to wait 5x as long for customer support. I worked at startup a few years back that refused to scale customer support so they could be forced to "automate" the process. The result? Customers got completely screwed over, but those customers weren't investors so who cares. I can't recall a single time in my life were automated customer support solved my problem, it just kept me busy so that the 5x wait doesn't seem as long since I'm trying to navigate the labyrinth of a customer support decision tree to get my problem solved.
  - ponector 3y ago
    That is true, it is not about the quality. But replacement is there. And customer is screwed, but who cares?
  - anthonypasq 3y ago
    ive had several instances where automated support solved my problem. Amazon re-shipped me a product that was stolen off my porch without me interacting with a human. The fact you're oblivious to this doesnt mean it isnt happening.
    - bilsbie 3y ago
      I’d argue that it’s not automated support at that point. It’s just a feature the software now handles.
qwertox 3y ago
Adding a link to Klarna's announcement [0] from two days ago and quoting their summary: - The AI assistant has had 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of Klarna’s customer service chats - It is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents - It is on par with human agents in regard to customer satisfaction score - It is more accurate in errand resolution, leading to a 25% drop in repeat inquiries - Customers now resolve their errands in less than 2 mins compared to 11 mins previously - It’s available in 23 markets, 24/7 and communicates in more than 35 languages - It’s estimated to drive a $40 million USD in profit improvement to Klarna in 2024 Apparently it affected a Call-Center's (Teleperformance) stock [1]. [0] https://www.klarna.com/international/press/klarna-ai-assistant-handles-two-thirds-of-customer-service-chats-in-its-first-month/ https://www.klarna.com/international/press/klarna-ai-assista... [1] https://live.euronext.com/en/product/equities/fr0000051807-xpar https://live.euronext.com/en/product/equities/fr0000051807-x...
- Dyac 3y ago
  How much of it really requires AI though? I bet the majority, if not all of the support that the AI offers could have been done with some of the non-AI chat flow builders if a handful of smart people got together and actually worked the flows out properly to handle the scenarios.
  - sn0wf1re 3y ago
    Isn't that the point though? There is no need to make chat flow builders and pay the "handful of smart people" to figure them out. If AI costs were reaching very high levels perhaps they would try to make non-AI flows for standard processes. But I think that is unlikely given how cheap AI is vs smart people wages.
    - kreetx 3y ago
      That's my impression as well: if customer service had been a priority enough, then these smart people would have been gathered already. But there have always been more important things to do. And now with LLMs, you don't have to find these smart people, and those you already have can do something else important.
arisAlexis 3y ago
Not true at all. Hearsay at best.
wvenable 3y ago
The consequence of almost all software the loss of jobs. I've personally been responsible for many many jobs disappearing with the software I've written. AI is just another form of software and if it is at all useful, and I believe that it is, then it will eliminate jobs. That should not be particularly surprising -- computers have already eliminated entire categories of jobs. I think the subtle point is that not all humans will replaced -- it's just that a human and AI will be able to do the work of a few humans. Same work, less people.
happytiger 3y ago
Unfortunately not only are there plenty of examples in the real world where this isn’t true and people are already being replaced, there’s a larger issue, and that’s the issue of the pace of improvement. People think AI technologies improve in a linear fashion. But there is nothing restricting this area of technology from non-linear progress. Consider the failing prophesies of AGI as a precient example of what’s happening: - It was 2015, and I’m reading articles about AGI being here in 2050 at least. - It’s 2018 and everyone is talking about a few new research papers but secure in their predictions but maybe feeling like it is skewing towards the bottom end of that range (except for a few inspired nerds — my people — who boldly claim 2035). - It’s 2022 and suddenly an AI is blowing people’s minds and we have the fastest growing technical product in the history of the world. Predictions are now 2030 for an AGI. - It’s 2024 and people are debating if AGI has already happened and debating about the definition and many people are calling for an “advanced level” AGI in the next 2-3 years. My point is that predictions of this technology have been terrible. Just like the worst. People have been off on every prediction by orders of magnitude. So now every major tech company is blowing all their money towards AI, realigning their business towards hardware and software solutions and we’re in the middle of an arms race the size of Jupiter towards AI technology, and it’s happening across the world but definitely in both China and the USA where the stock market is going crazy and 25% of the entire markets growth is just nvidia’s massive growth (and those gains are basically powered by the leading ai training solutions). So, the idea that somehow the technology isn’t going to replace people is asinine. This is the biggest, fastest tech wave I have ever seen, it’s growing geometrically, it’s funded by insane amounts of money and has most of the western and eastern world’s technology research focused on it, and has been wildly ahead of predictions from its inception. Let’s get real about this. This is a bomb going off in slow motion and is set to interrupt employment and radically reshape society in a time scale that almost no humans can physically comprehend. But more importantly the trend is accelerating and like most parabolic markets that don’t have physical limitations holding them back (like input materials for a gold rush) it could accelerate to literally crazy levels. There’s no restriction but breakthroughs here. I’m aware of the current reality of the software systems and I know what I’m saying is futurist, but from a trend perspective we are way, way ahead of where we thought we were going to be and the trends point to railgun speed acceleration from here.
qgin 3y ago
If management judges the AI "good enough" to fire people, I think you can describe those people as having been replaced by AI. People may debate whether it's a replacement of equal quality, but people still got replaced by AI.

rblatz 3y ago

It's not an all or nothing situation you can put an AI agent in front of real agents, if the AI agent is able to answer the customers question you do not need to escalate to a real human. That could allow 10 humans to now do the job of say 20. Did AI replace those 10 jobs, I'd argue yes.

roland35 3y ago
Yes, exactly like how a sewing machine helped replace sewers. One person can do the job of 2.
randomdata 3y ago
> Did AI replace those 10 jobs, I'd argue yes. Did it, or is it like the automated elevator? The automated elevator didn't reduce the number of elevator operators, it substantially increased the number of elevator operators.

ilamont 3y ago

Amazon and others already claim they use AI to handle customer support and marketing copy (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/how-amazon-uses-generative-ai https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/how-am...). Air Canada got burned when an AI chatbot made a mistake (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39378235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39378235). Legal firms have been fined for hallucinated precedent citations (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491510). The technology is clearly flawed. Regardless, a lower cost option (AI) is replacing a higher priced option (human labor). Ten years ago these tasks would have been handled by human employees or specialists. There is certainly a history of this in the corporate world, when expensive union labor in Detroit is replaced by lower cost workers in Mississippi, manufacturing experts are forced to train their replacements in lower-cost countries, or entire engineering and customer service departments are shifted overseas.

Tagbert 3y ago
We use some AI for the first level of customer support. It can provide standard answers to common questions and help with routine action requests, but it is backed up by human operators for anything more complex and customers can opt out of the AI whenever they want. From customer surveys, they tend to like using the AI for simple things because it is faster and they get what they need. The like that they can get a human when they need too. If you aren't providing a human fallback, you aren't doing it right.
- cogman10 3y ago
  Bingo, and that's the part of AI that I think is overlooked. It might kill some jobs, but it'll never kill an entire sector like the web killed travel agencies. And the thing is, the more the risk the less likely an LLM is going to be trusted to just make a decision. For example, do you think an insurance agency would want an LLM to decide, on it's own, claim approvals? Can you imagine the headache for the insurance agency if the LLM approves the wrong claims or denies the wrong claims? Or for a doctors office, Imagine AI diagnostics without a human. Can you imagine the headache for a hospital when an AI misses cancer? Or diagnoses a false cancer? It's bad enough when humans get that wrong, but now you have to explain to your legal team "We just left up the practice to the stats gods!"
  - notpachet 3y ago
    Can you imagine a lawyer using ChatGPT to draft legal briefs and find relevant case histories? Well...
  - mattgreenrocks 3y ago
    > For example, do you think an insurance agency would want an LLM to decide, on it's own, claim approvals? Can you imagine the headache for the insurance agency if the LLM approves the wrong claims or denies the wrong claims? You say this, but I sometimes worry that these issues are hand-waved away by decision-makers with, "oh we'll just have another LLM doing frontline claim support to verify these issues." It's the whole XML/violence thing, where the solution to XML-induced pain often ends up being more XML.

bregma 3y ago

I suspect the closer you are to the models the farther you are from the decision making.

pavlov 3y ago

And the idea of giving up on customer service isn't anything new. Google and Meta have been extremely successful with this approach. AI is just an excuse for others to follow suit.

disgruntledphd2 3y ago
Google and Meta have great customer support for the advertisers that spend loads of money with them.

ponector 3y ago

That is not true. Jobs have been already replaced, even before chatgpt. Customer support team of 10 is replaced with chatbot and 2 people. Half of the jobs will be replaced with AI soon. Writers? No need to have huge team, one senior is enough. Developers? Lawyers? Illustrators? Lay off half and replace them with AI tools!

PheonixPharts 3y ago
> Customer support team of 10 is replaced with chatbot and 2 people. My experience, having grown up when all customer service reps were people, is exactly what I stated above: this is just giving up on customer service. Anyone who has ever called automated support knows this. When you reduce 10 people to 2 people and some chatbots now you simply have to wait 5x as long for customer support. I worked at startup a few years back that refused to scale customer support so they could be forced to "automate" the process. The result? Customers got completely screwed over, but those customers weren't investors so who cares. I can't recall a single time in my life were automated customer support solved my problem, it just kept me busy so that the 5x wait doesn't seem as long since I'm trying to navigate the labyrinth of a customer support decision tree to get my problem solved.
- ponector 3y ago
  That is true, it is not about the quality. But replacement is there. And customer is screwed, but who cares?
- anthonypasq 3y ago
  ive had several instances where automated support solved my problem. Amazon re-shipped me a product that was stolen off my porch without me interacting with a human. The fact you're oblivious to this doesnt mean it isnt happening.
  - bilsbie 3y ago
    I’d argue that it’s not automated support at that point. It’s just a feature the software now handles.

qwertox 3y ago

Adding a link to Klarna's announcement [0] from two days ago and quoting their summary: - The AI assistant has had 2.3 million conversations, two-thirds of Klarna’s customer service chats - It is doing the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents - It is on par with human agents in regard to customer satisfaction score - It is more accurate in errand resolution, leading to a 25% drop in repeat inquiries - Customers now resolve their errands in less than 2 mins compared to 11 mins previously - It’s available in 23 markets, 24/7 and communicates in more than 35 languages - It’s estimated to drive a $40 million USD in profit improvement to Klarna in 2024 Apparently it affected a Call-Center's (Teleperformance) stock [1]. [0] https://www.klarna.com/international/press/klarna-ai-assistant-handles-two-thirds-of-customer-service-chats-in-its-first-month/ https://www.klarna.com/international/press/klarna-ai-assista... [1] https://live.euronext.com/en/product/equities/fr0000051807-xpar https://live.euronext.com/en/product/equities/fr0000051807-x...

Dyac 3y ago
How much of it really requires AI though? I bet the majority, if not all of the support that the AI offers could have been done with some of the non-AI chat flow builders if a handful of smart people got together and actually worked the flows out properly to handle the scenarios.
- sn0wf1re 3y ago
  Isn't that the point though? There is no need to make chat flow builders and pay the "handful of smart people" to figure them out. If AI costs were reaching very high levels perhaps they would try to make non-AI flows for standard processes. But I think that is unlikely given how cheap AI is vs smart people wages.
  - kreetx 3y ago
    That's my impression as well: if customer service had been a priority enough, then these smart people would have been gathered already. But there have always been more important things to do. And now with LLMs, you don't have to find these smart people, and those you already have can do something else important.

arisAlexis 3y ago

Not true at all. Hearsay at best.

wvenable 3y ago

The consequence of almost all software the loss of jobs. I've personally been responsible for many many jobs disappearing with the software I've written. AI is just another form of software and if it is at all useful, and I believe that it is, then it will eliminate jobs. That should not be particularly surprising -- computers have already eliminated entire categories of jobs. I think the subtle point is that not all humans will replaced -- it's just that a human and AI will be able to do the work of a few humans. Same work, less people.

happytiger 3y ago

Unfortunately not only are there plenty of examples in the real world where this isn’t true and people are already being replaced, there’s a larger issue, and that’s the issue of the pace of improvement. People think AI technologies improve in a linear fashion. But there is nothing restricting this area of technology from non-linear progress. Consider the failing prophesies of AGI as a precient example of what’s happening: - It was 2015, and I’m reading articles about AGI being here in 2050 at least. - It’s 2018 and everyone is talking about a few new research papers but secure in their predictions but maybe feeling like it is skewing towards the bottom end of that range (except for a few inspired nerds — my people — who boldly claim 2035). - It’s 2022 and suddenly an AI is blowing people’s minds and we have the fastest growing technical product in the history of the world. Predictions are now 2030 for an AGI. - It’s 2024 and people are debating if AGI has already happened and debating about the definition and many people are calling for an “advanced level” AGI in the next 2-3 years. My point is that predictions of this technology have been terrible. Just like the worst. People have been off on every prediction by orders of magnitude. So now every major tech company is blowing all their money towards AI, realigning their business towards hardware and software solutions and we’re in the middle of an arms race the size of Jupiter towards AI technology, and it’s happening across the world but definitely in both China and the USA where the stock market is going crazy and 25% of the entire markets growth is just nvidia’s massive growth (and those gains are basically powered by the leading ai training solutions). So, the idea that somehow the technology isn’t going to replace people is asinine. This is the biggest, fastest tech wave I have ever seen, it’s growing geometrically, it’s funded by insane amounts of money and has most of the western and eastern world’s technology research focused on it, and has been wildly ahead of predictions from its inception. Let’s get real about this. This is a bomb going off in slow motion and is set to interrupt employment and radically reshape society in a time scale that almost no humans can physically comprehend. But more importantly the trend is accelerating and like most parabolic markets that don’t have physical limitations holding them back (like input materials for a gold rush) it could accelerate to literally crazy levels. There’s no restriction but breakthroughs here. I’m aware of the current reality of the software systems and I know what I’m saying is futurist, but from a trend perspective we are way, way ahead of where we thought we were going to be and the trends point to railgun speed acceleration from here.

qgin 3y ago

If management judges the AI "good enough" to fire people, I think you can describe those people as having been replaced by AI. People may debate whether it's a replacement of equal quality, but people still got replaced by AI.