Business owner 'hires' ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans
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
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
I fucking hate capitalism and its demand that everyone has to work a fulltime job.
Job automation could and should be a good thing. We as a society should aspire to get rid of as many work hours as possible to actually do the things we like. Instead we are being forced to do shittier and shittier things because we are nothing more than slaves to some billionaires
Back in the good old days of the Stone Age we used to work 4-6 hours per day, based on the anthropological evidence we have (as Historia Civilis points out[1]). That seems to be the amount of work humans naturally slot into when left alone. Instead we work 8+ hours per day per 5 day work week. In European countries like the Netherlands, and the Nordics, for example, that's slightly below 7 hours per day (on average, assuming a 5 day work week), so they're getting close to the range we used to work. But a 4 day work week still seems like an almost utopian idea to achieve politically, despite all the insane productivity gains we've made over the last 100 years thanks to automation that makes even a four day work week seem laughable - we should probably be thinking of a three day work week at this point.
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‘All billionaires’
“ 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.”
my brother in christ thats a you/your company problem and an example of absolute failure to train
I've worked in a call center for 3 years and I can tell you hating your employees is an industry culture thing
As is a great deal of corporate nepotism.
A lot of the managers come from their own middle management layer employee stock who have absolutely no idea how the technical aspects of the product work, so inevitably you end up with the lazy leading the blind.
You don't see calligraphist or scribe as regular jobs anymore. It's because the automated systems we created via typewriters and text editors were sufficient to replace them wholesale.
Sometimes jobs getting automated does not create sustainable jobs to replace them. That's just going to happen more often as time goes on.
Which is just another reason upon the mountain of reasons that capitalism is a terrible system and cannot be allowed to continue
While I agree with the anti-capitalist sentiment, your anger is misaimed. Forcibly keeping nonprofitable jobs which are easily replaceable by AI is contrary to contemporary marxian-derivative theories (see Bullshit jobs by David Graber). We, as a society should seize technical advancements such as AI and automation to let people work less while allowing them to afford life. Thus contemporary economists and modern monetary theories are more and more open to the idea of universal basic income.
Totally agree. That’s the same way I feel about Uber Drivers. I’ve used Waymo and it’s amazing, better than the average Uber driver I’ve had. It’s a bad job that doesn’t pay enough, and while I hope those drivers are able to move on to better things, it’s a job that should disappear. If we wanted to protect jobs we should have kept the union Taxi Drivers. The current system just grids up poor people for Uber’s profit
I'm actually very torn on this. On the one hand, it will suck for customers with real problems to have to deal with poor customer service.
On the other hand, I work in IT. Most people call in with the stupidest questions that can be easily answered by a bot or by simply not being an idiot. And it really sucks to have someone intelligent deal with those questions 100 times a day.
Ideally robots would do all the shit jobs no one wants to do like sweep floors and tier 1 IT support. Then, hopefully, we could all get UBI and decide if we want to design and repair robots, or make bespoke jam, or do some other job robots generally can't do. Alas.
I was on a bot chat the other day. "I have super admin permissions but it wont let me switch XYZ toggle."
It said "I don't understand this, can you rephrase?"
I said, "I can't switch Xyz toggle despite having admin permissions."
"I don't understand can you rephrase"
"no."
"connecting you to a real person"
Agreed, though as a customer my biggest pet peeve is having to talk to someone because the functionality is inexplicably not available on their website. If having a chat bot to do this gets around the issue I'm all for it.
A good example even before the whole LLM boom is that one of the couriers in my country (Purolator) implemented a truly useful chat bot a few years ago. I can do all kinds of stuff with it that you would have to call any other courier to get done, such as update my address to let the driver know a buzzer number.
The article only slightly touched on this, but the incoming LLM customer service chatbots are going to absolutely fucking suck, just like outsourcing all the call centers made customer service actually a lot worse, not because people farther away are worse at customer service or anything, but because companies created rigid systems and scripts to remove any agency from its agents. It's now common for these outsourced call centers to have an initial layer of absolutely useless positions who are only allowed to do a few things, and then they have to escalate to a "supervisor," who is clearly just an agent with slightly more privileges, and this continues recursively forever. All this does is make the call last forever, but hey, they save some money, and customers like you and me are forced to spend an hour plus on the phone any time we have a problem with any large company.
Capitalist job replacement isn't a one-for-one. So long as it makes more profits to do it, they will, even if it makes the service suck. When I have a problem, I need a person with some understanding and agency to resolve it on the other end. LLMs don't know anything. Even a semi-fluent person with no admin privileges is so much more useful than an LLM. These companies are going to fire all these workers and make customer service an absolute fucking nightmare.
And if you support my bid for president, I will require every business over 50 employees to have a corporate office in every state they do business in (two on the extra large ones) , so no matter where you live, you can yell at someone face to face instead of into a phone with nobody listening.
That's it. That's my whole platform. No plans, just this.
I'm a fan of doing business locally for this reason. People tend to treat you better when they know if they piss someone off enough that person could take a baseball bat to their car. Joking aside, small local companies tend to care about reputation. You are 1 of 1,000, not 1,000,000. Your money constitutes a significant portion of their profits. Unfortunately, it seems like every day there are less small businesses to do business with.
I had to pay a small medical bill once and everytime I called it would take me to an answering machine after 2 or 3 minutes. They would call back after 1 or 2 hours and by that time I'm usually at work so I couldn't answer my phone since I'm driving. I just ended up giving up and stopped trying to pay it. IDK what happened to it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/16luf4o/an_ai_phone_call_api_powered_by_chatgpts_api_this/
Sorry, don't have a different link for the video. But if that's a real demo...
Even if that's a real demo, I still have two thoughts.
First, the technical capacity of it has nothing to do with our user experience. Indian people are just as good at delivering customer service as Americans are, yet when we outsource customer service, we make it worse.
Second, even in that demo, the chat bot didn't do anything. I very rarely call customer service for technical support. When I call, I normally need specific answers to me, or actions from the company, like a flight change, or an explanation for a charge I don't understand, or to coordinate warrantied repairs on something I just bought, etc. Notice that all the information the chatbot gave was general-purpose, googlable stuff. Companies aren't going to let their chatbots change your flight for you or whatever. What's going to happen is we're going to have to deal with an LLM that can't actually resolve our problems, and convince it to go fetch a human.
This reads like a onion article