3 ms·
We could have been much closer to automation already, but we still have clerks and call center attendants, which are trivial to automate. Why? I believe it jus
by hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
We could have been much closer to automation already, but we still have clerks and call center attendants, which are trivial to automate. Why?
I believe it just doesn't happen because, although automation can increase productivity and lower costs long-term, it has a high initial investment compared to human labor for many non-critical tasks and the pressure everywhere is for profits now. Plus, human labor is cheap, and will keep being cheap as long as population is increasing, so this is a force that will push more and more against automation the more we automate. The critical threshold between human labor -> automation will happen only once (and if) human population growth turns negative, turning wages up.
- jarrett 13y agoI don't think they're trivial to automate, actually. Take the Home Depot self-checkout counters. They're already present in most (all?) Home Depot locations that I've visited. But Home Depot hasn't gotten rid of clerks entirely. This is probably in part because the self-checkout counters don't always work properly. Furthermore, there are things Home Depot sells which the self-checkout machines can't process. Based on that example, it seems that automating clerks well enough to eliminate clerks altogether is actually a hard problem. As for call centers, they already are heavily automated, and have been for some time. Every touchtone menu you're forced to deal with is evidence of this fact. Nonetheless, there comes a point when touchtone menus can't solve the customer's problem. (I for one only call a company if I'm facing an unusual situation, so the touchtone menu never solves my problem.) Because artificial intelligence cannot yet listen to a person's problems and devise a solution, human operators are still needed.