Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls

Verizon has turned to Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI to automate phone calls
theregister.com

The profit motive of corporations is directly in conflict with the duty to social good. As we proceed into an automated future, our labor protections are pricing humans out of the market. A great deal of unnecessary evil and pain worldwide results from this conflict.

At the scale of corporations such as Verizon, even a cost efficiency of one cent per transaction can translate into tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on the bottom line. Simple state machines with rigorously defined transitions are very efficient. Creatively handling exceptions and undefined states is a capability of human employees, and it's often very inefficient to do so. A million automated transactions could occur for every one bespoke transaction requiring ingenious human attention. Ideally, corporations would prefer not to hire people at all, but where does that leave us as a society?

Not just that, but the skill and knowledge requirements to compete with automation will continue to grow and less and less people will be able to meet that demand. Many people argue that many thought this would be the case with many technical revolutions before, but fail to admit that it's converging on a singularity. Sure jobs we didn't know would exist are being created where people can shift their work to, but the cycle for automation is becoming shorter and cheaper and sooner or later we as humans won't be able to keep up (unless you meet the high demands which are unreasonable to expect everyone to adapt to).

A well designed service doesn't let phone agents do anything the customer couldn't do themselves. It is literally called customer support, because they help you do the things you want to do, rather than doing it for you.