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.
Exactly - I don't understand the argument of "this happened before to people worse off than you, and you are entitled if you complain about it now happening to more people (including you)".
Unless we somehow reform the whole society into a socioeconomic utopia in the next decade or so, what started happening now with AI has all the potential to speed up the wealth gap growth and push everyone else towards the gutter.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
I have talked to customers using the product my company was selling and this was as an engineer who worked on that specific tool. The hardest part in this process was trying to understand what exact issue the customer faced, since as an engineer and someone who built the tool, I am completely aware of how it works. The customer is not and they might not be in the proper mood to even consider learning through it step by step.
My respect for what the customer support people did immediately went up a lot, after sitting through a few calls.
Customer support execs in most companies at least either have documentation or enough experience to understand where the customer is heading with the discussion and resolve problems quicker. Most customers especially larger ones would have account executives who are aware of the customer's needs and personalities and how to deal with them/help them.
I do not think an AI chatbot can replace that, at least as of now. And for those, quoting `it will get better in x years`, do note that those entities who have resources to fund such researches and improve things are slowly evolving from research first to profit first, which means we might not get the AI future we want, but what they want.
> Customer support execs in most companies at least either have documentation or enough experience to understand where the customer is heading with the discussion and resolve problems quicker.
This gives me the sense there's a nice training set, and a fairly clear way to measure the AI's performance. "It will get better in X years" sounds very likely
There's a difference "between 12 people asked about X" and reaching out on Slack to a product team "a customer asked about X and the behaviour is weird, why would enabling setting Y cause X to ...", and that's the issue that I worry goes missing with removing support staff from the main org.
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.