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Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

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Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#101

Post by reustle »

pjmlp wrote: post #51

This is just the start, just wait until most LLM can outperform junior devs on the quality of generated code.

We are just about there, if not past. Check out "Copilot for Pull Requests", "GPT Engineer", and "StarCoder LLM".

Friends and I have all been working to experiment with these sorts of things locally, to reduce the cost to basically zero.

I am sure we can guess what 1-3 years from now starts to look like, as technical project managers and sr devs are able to harness many of these tools (see langchain) and just write english unit tests.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#103

Post by ghshephard »

radicalbyte wrote: post #86
gnufied wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same goes for almost all grocery shops here - Publix, Kroger, target etc replacing checkout with self-checkout kiosks completely. I absolute hate using self-checkout for non-packaged groceries items. Especially if I have lots of stuff. Freaking "unintended item in baggage area". Not to mention, I feel like Publix etc in particular employed lots of folks with disability. It warmed my heart to talk to them. I don't kno…

Here in The Netherlands we don't have that thing where they weigh your bag to make sure you haven't stolen something. They instead have two people for 8-10 checkouts and do random inspections where they scan your bags. Works great and also gave me a huge shock when I went back to the UK and Sainsbury's treated me like a criminal.

Nice thing about whole foods - there is person there to help you with the self-checkout (in case something doesn't scan, price isn't right - rare) - but there isn't any scan or check of bags/receipts. It's close, fast, and convenient enough that I just do my shopping every day for most stuff, with a few exceptions like Milk that I might buy a weeks worth of stuff. The Palm Scan Instapay thing is awesome too.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#104

Post by ghaff »

sokoloff wrote: post #74
carapace wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's really hard for anything that doesn't involve going to a local store or service. Is that such a bad thing? FWIW it used to be that you could pick up the phone, dial '0', and talk to an operator , a real human being with significant power over the system they operated. When the phone companies got rid of human operators: that was the beginning of the end of ...something?

You used to be able to go into elevators and tell the attendant what floor you were going to, or have the ice delivery service figure out how much you needed for the next day as well. The current situation is a significant improvement, IMO.

Yeah, I don't really have problems interacting with most people. If I wanted a pizza right now I'd have no problem with calling my local pizza place and heading over there to pick it up.

But at some point the idea that we should maintain low-paying, pretty boring (although there are lots of customer interactions) "bullshit" jobs so we can eschew automation pretty much falls apart. (And different businesses will draw different lines.)

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#105

Post by canucker2016 »

gnufied wrote: post #27
ghaff wrote: post #2

There's been a pretty steady trend towards automation, chatbots, self-service, etc. replacing getting an empowered human on the line. Given labor costs and labor shortages, expect even more. Had an airline thing that the website (and app) wouldn't let me complete online. Spent ages on hold but then was able to get hold of their premium account number and was fixed right away. (Of course, would actually have preferred…

Same goes for almost all grocery shops here - Publix, Kroger, target etc replacing checkout with self-checkout kiosks completely. I absolute hate using self-checkout for non-packaged groceries items. Especially if I have lots of stuff. Freaking "unintended item in baggage area". Not to mention, I feel like Publix etc in particular employed lots of folks with disability. It warmed my heart to talk to them. I don't kno…

Plus there are some customers who misscan stuff to pay less (they buy a lot of "bananas").

also the discretionary purchases that occurred while waiting in line disappear - no gum/chocolate bar or celebrity/gossip magazine sales

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#106

Post by [deleted] »

misnome wrote: post #97
WestCoastJustin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been using ChatGPT to solve work problems? I have. It's amazing. This technology can do amazing things and companies should be using it to solve problems. Of course I think it can improve things. Think about what happens when companies start to build corporate LLM's trained on their docs, code, knowledge base, support tickets, etc. You're going to have super human support. Sure, this might assist the current…

What do you mean by “work problems”. Writing regex? SQL? Exclusively software development? Outside of this, even using for “summarizing” documents, you are lucky if it doesn’t distort or twist meanings such that it isn’t useful, except now you have spent as much or more time checking it’s work than just doing it yourself. Checking others’ work is much harder than writing it. Every time I’ve attempted to ask it someth…

[deleted]

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#107

Post by jgilias »

pjmlp wrote: post #51

This is just the start, just wait until most LLM can outperform junior devs on the quality of generated code.

The value of a junior dev is not the code they manage to produce. It’s their potential to become mid and senior later on.

What I’m trying to say is that LLMs don’t change anything here. Juniors are not hired for the work they can produce when hired.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#108

Post by throwaway14356 »

ghaff wrote: post #2

There's been a pretty steady trend towards automation, chatbots, self-service, etc. replacing getting an empowered human on the line. Given labor costs and labor shortages, expect even more. Had an airline thing that the website (and app) wouldn't let me complete online. Spent ages on hold but then was able to get hold of their premium account number and was fixed right away. (Of course, would actually have preferred…

i think things will move towards rfid eventually, then you just roll though the checkout and everything gets detected. We have an increasing number of packages with statiegeld, you get some money when you return it to the store. The annoyance is increasing there too but if the tags can be reused it would be interesting.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#109

Post by dpflan »

malikNF wrote: post #76

Wonder if prompt injection is going to steal the crown from sql injection.

For sure. Or become a new entry point for sql injection. As it is conversational, maybe the combined attack could be called a "speak-ql injection".

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#110

Post by mike_hock »

jarjoura wrote: post #87
BigBalli wrote: post #56

I don't understand why everyone (excluding people who were replaced) is so "outraged".

What is the response you expect from everyone? 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 wo…

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.
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