Business owner 'hires' ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans
Experts divided on whether a new wave of call centre automation will make for better jobs for people, or merely throw millions out of work
For really useless call centers this makes sense.
I have no doubt that a ML chatbot is perfectly capable of being as useless as an untrained human first level supporter with a language barrier.
And the dude in the article basically admits that's what his call center was like:
Suumit Shah never liked his company’s customer service team. His agents gave generic responses to clients’ issues. Faced with difficult problems, they often sounded stumped, he said.
So evidently good support outcomes were never the goal.
Agreed. Should we also mourn for the horse and buggy drivers? The gas station attendants? And the whole slew of jobs that have become obsolete over the centuries?
I do think we need something like UBI and I’m not ignoring the lost jobs but shit jobs shouldn’t have to exist. I’ll mourn for the workers but not for the job. Continuing to employee people to do thankless/hard/dangerous/etc jobs is just silly.
I've worked in this field for 25 years and don't think that ChatGPT by itself can handle most workloads, even if it's trained on them.
There are usually transactions which must be done and often ad hoc tasks which end up being the most important things because when things break, you aren't trained for them.
If you don't have a feedback loop to solve those issues, your whole business may just break without you knowing.
I think you're talking about actual support, that knows their tools and can do things.
This article sound more about the generic outsourced call center that will never, ever get something useful done in any case.
I ordered Chipotle for delivery and I got the wrong order. I don't eat meat so it's not like I could just say whelp, I'm eating this chicken today I guess.
The only way to report an issue is to chat with their bot. And it is hell. I finally got a voucher for a free entree but what about the delivery fee and the tip back? Impossible.
I felt like Sisyphus.
I waited for the transaction to post and disputed the charge on my card and it credited me back.
There's so many if-and-or-else scenarios that no amount of scraping the world's libraries is AI today able to sort out these scenarios.
Yes these kind of transactions really need to be hand coded to be handled well. LLM's are very poorly suited to this kind of thing (though I doubt you were dealing with an LLM at Chipotle just yet).
Maybe you work at a decent place but in my experience you're really overestimating the people who answer calls and give generic responses.
Cheaper than outsourcing to poor countries with middling English speaking capability.
Coming to call center lines near you: voiced chatbots to replace the ineffective, useless customer support lines that exist today with the same useless outcomes for consumers but endless juggling back and forth without any real resolutions. Let's make customer service even shittier, again!
If you bought the product we don't need to worry about losing money anymore bro
On one hand, they're crap jobs. On the other hand, in most economies we have crap jobs not because they're necessary for productivity, but to give us an excuse to pay people to live.
Maybe if enough jobs are lost to automation, we'll start to rethink the structure of a society that only allows people to live if they're useful to a rich person.
Essentially, we're just still doing feudalism with extra steps, and it's high time we cut that nonsense out.
I think once workers can be replaced, there will be some virus that wipes out most of humanity. No point keeping billions of people around if they aren't needed.
We have crappy jobs because jobs need doing and it was still cheaper to get humans to do it without a substantial loss in functionality. They don't exist because of some form of social altruism, as evidenced by the fact that as soon as a semi-viable alternative is offered then the jobs are gone.
With the dynamic shifting to automation, prematurely I would add, then employers are seeing a much cheaper way to achieve 80% of what they currently offer.
What if we get it to agree to give us stuff for free? Is it a representative of the company or not?
You also have to have a reasonable belief the company representative is authorized to do whatever they're doing to be entitled to it.
karens do
I see two inevitable problems;
1, I assume you mean the business does outsourced customer service, not as an internal department.
2, universal basic income time, or let's put people to work on creative, innovative applications not mind numbing shit
We don't need to keep all bullshit jobs around. The printing press putting hand written scribes out of jobs was a good thing. This is similar. New jobs will be created that will hopefully create more productive work.
Seems like a good way to get the "agent" to agree it's in the wrong, and get 100% refund
I'm interested in if the AI agent has the power to disseminate refunds or at least return authorizations.
One of the things fascinating to me is that some of the problems humans are bad at handling (such as social engineering) AI tends to be even worse at.
I mean, if you go to your credit card provider with a copy of the log with their rep, and the rep says "i authorize a refund", you can atleast make the argument.
Any company scummy enough to trust an AI for this wouldnt give it the authority, though
Remember when AI was going to make life better for everyone?
Yeah. That shit’ll be the end of us.
AI will make the life better for the shareholders
Hopefully it'll be the end of capitalism. How is the economical model supposed to function when nobody is working? Where are people supposed to get money from? How is anything going to be taxed?
Realistically though it'll somehow push capitalism into hyperdrive and enslave the global population under the control of the AI owners.
It didn't work that well when people were working anyway.
It won't for as long as all the power is in the capital owner's hands.
A lot of jobs are just busy work that does nothing and makes nothing. Talking about automating them misses the point of why the jobs exists in the first place.
"I see that you are throwing a ball at a target that is connected to a platform with a human sitting above a tank of water. Here is a AI generated picture of a random human underwater to sate your needs. Ya! I have made this process 200% more efficient!"
It's crazy how people seem fundamentally incapable of looking at the big picture and ask themselves things like, "what even is the purpose of society? Is this the best society humanity is able to come up with? What if I am not ready to accept society as it is presented to me, what are my alternatives, do I even have any? What are my obligations towards a society that marginalizes me and treats me like a second or third tier human, without any hope of ever improving my lot?"
Ask people if they would rather be free and get everything they want without having to work for it. The answers you'll get will boggle your mind.
We've been permeated by the idea that "you have to be financially productive to be a decent human" for so long, even people against excessive/useless work still sometimes miss the point of this crazy race toward making more benefit regardless of anything else.
Sometimes, reaching the "it works" point is enough, but higher ups never stops there. It always have to be "better/more".
I'm surprised by the number of workaholics that exist, like why do you want to work so much? Go explore the world, learn things, make things, but people want to work instead?
You still need to employ some humans as a backup when the AI catastrophically fucks up, but for the most part it makes sense. Not all jobs need to continue to exist.
Exactly. As the article ends:
Not every customer service employee should worry about being replaced, but those who simply copy and paste responses are no longer safe, according to Shah.
“That job is gone,” he said. “100 per cent.”
Working conditions in this industry are not great. The turnover rate can reach 80% sometimes. It can be a difficult, stressful and low paid job that few people enjoy. At the same time, the demand for this work keeps increasing as more and more of consumer activity shifts online and remote. It seems to me that the technology may be a net benefit in this case. The public and its regulatory authority should, however, keep a close eye on developments to make sure humans are not left behind.
This is just the smallest tip of the iceberg.
I've been working with gpt-4 since the week it came out, and I guarantee you that even if it never became any more advanced, it could already put at least 30% of the white collar workforce out of business.
The only reason it hasn't is because companies have barely started to comprehend what it can do.
Within 5 years the entire world will have been revolutionized by this technology. Jobs will evaporate faster than anyone is talking about.
If you're very smart, and you begin to use gpt-4 to write the tools that will replace you, then you MIGHT have 10 good years left in this economy before humans are all but obsolete.
If you're not staying up nights, scared shitless by what's coming, it's because you don't really understand what gpt-4 can do.
You sound like one of those idiots preaching the apocalypse from a street corner. Humans obsolete in 10 years? Yeah sure buddy, right after all those profits trickle down. This is just another tool, an interesting one to be sure, but still just a tool. If you're staying up nights worrying about this, you don't really understand the technology, or maybe you're just worried someone is going to realize you don't do shit.
I work with AI stuff, just getting into LLM, but I have been doing SD work since the public release last year. In just over 1 year the SD capability has gone from being able to draw a passable image of a cat at 512x512 pixels that required a reasonably powerful graphics card to complete to being able to create 4k images on the same cards that are nearly indistinguishable from actual photos/paintings. It is the single fastest adaptation and development of a technology I have seen in my 30 years in tech. I have actually been tracking the job market and the impacts that this will have and he is not all that far off in his estimate. The current push in AI development is nearly a ubiquitous existential threat to employment as we view it in the society of the United States. Everyone is on the chopping block and you'd best believe that the C-level executives want to eliminate as many positions as possible. Labor is viewed as an atrocious expense and the first place that cuts should be made. I challenge you to actually come up with a list of 10 jobs that employ more than 100,000 people in the country that you think would be safe from AI and I will see how many of them I can find information on someone who is already actively working on eliminating them.
Companies don't want employees, only paying customers. If they can eliminate employees, they will. Hence self-checkouts in grocers, pay at the pump for gas stations, order kiosks at McDonald's, mobile ordering for virtually every fast food place, the list goes on and on. These are all recent non-AI replacements that have cut into the employment prospects for people.
I think once sap and jira start implementing a lot more AI and make it simpler to use it could cut down a lot of corporate jobs, not the hands on stuff but a lot of the simpler jobs like purchasing and inventory staff could be shrunken down to a fewer people and fewer cubicles. At least that's what we talked about at our company how everyone is adjusting to the new world especially advertising now that everything will be served to you by a bot instead of a search
As I said, if you're not scared shitless, you really don't understand what gpt-4 can do.
It's not "just another tool."
It's an intelligence.
This technology is more world-changing than computers, the Internet, or mobile technology. And it's evolving faster than any of those things did.
You'll see. Unfortunately.
You sound like one of those peasants standing on street corners saying, "horses replaced with fuming metal boxes in 10 years? Hah, yeah, sure buddy, right after we put a man on the moon! Getoutta here, you loon!"
There is a video from CGP Grey titled Humans Need Not Apply that is extremely relevant. It was posted 9 years ago. It's a great video, I highly recommend everyone check it out.
Thanks for sharing. If you see that list of type of jobs at the end, it's easy to see which jobs could get replaced within a reasonably short amount of time. Greed will always find a way to profit from whatever development arises. If they have 1 mountain of gold, they want 2 mountains of gold.
Yup. This is why it is vital that we all get behind Universal Basic Income.
The jobs will leave and they won't come back. UBI is inevitable, but if we don't get there soon enough there will be years of suffering and poverty for hundreds of millions.
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I'm a senior Linux sysadmin who's been following the evolution of AI over this past year just like you, and just like you I've been spending my days and nights tinkering with it non stop, and I have come to more or less the same conclusion as you have.
The downvotes are from people who haven't used the AI, and who are still in the Internet 1.0 mindset. How people still don't get just how revolutionary this technology is, is beyond me. But yeah, in a few years that'll be evident enough, time will show.