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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

#161

Post by phpisthebest »

alluro2 wrote: post #138
phpisthebest wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I resisted using online ordering at Kroger for a long time, then in 2021 I started using the mobile app, and just picking up my groceries... now I have not be inside a Kroger in almost 2 years and have no plans on going back in. The Kroger App is great, and having them bring the stuff out, load me up, and I drive away... even if they actually go back to charging $5 for the service I am paying. >>I don't know what hum…

I'm yet to see prices going down, or at least not going up at the same pace as everywhere else, because a supermarket chain implemented self-checkout. I don't think anyone buys (pun intended) the argument of self-checkout being there to enable lower prices for consumers.

Given the extreme inflation, most likely it means priced did not increase as fast as they otherwise would have.

If consumers did not like them, they would not use them and the companies would get rid of them. Unfortunately for you many consumers not only are willing to use them some even prefer them because they in fact do not want to interact with a cashier

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

#162

Post by bombolo »

codetrotter wrote: post #85
Dylan16807 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But they simply aren't designed for a full shopping cart which includes a ton of non-barcoded items. Huh. Everything at my grocery store either has a barcode or is produce that needs to be weighed, so there's no speed advantage for a cashier. And they've gone through different sizes of self-checkout, some of which actually had more room than the cashier checkouts.

> produce that needs to be weighed In Spain and France (and probably other countries too) they’ve been doing something that’s pretty neat in regards to the fruits and vegetables since long before self-checkout even became a thing, but which helps a lot now with self-checkout as well. When you go to the fruits and vegetables section of the store, a lot of these stores have a scale there with a printer. So when you pic…

And you have to find your item among hundreds of items

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

#163

Post by topynate »

What's the disclosure that breaks the NDA this tweeter is supposed to have had? I searched every quote in the thread and they're all already public. Tweet #11 shows as "unavailable", but the archived version at https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1681673980682305541.html refers to a "Code Yellow" that did leak, but in March: https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-issues-code-yellow-f...

I tried to find people complaining about being left on hold by shopify support and got nothing on twitter. All the complaints are about the account payments being on hold, i.e. shitty but par for the course risk/compliance issues.

The remaining thread content is the sort of inference and speculation that anyone with the right political bent could have made, given a few hours to research the company.

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

#164

Post by neilv »

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…

Most self-checkouts here are surprisingly bad, but Whole Food Markets ones work well enough. However, WFM recently managed to ruin that in a different way...

The WFM self-checkouts here recently started displaying dead-on video camera closeup views of the customer's face, on-screen, during checkout.

They're doing this in neighborhoods with upscale customers, so I'm thinking maybe it's not a rough part of town "you are being watched" security thing. (That would seem incongruous with the premium WFM brand, and how historically they've seemed to want customers to feel about shopping there.)

Maybe the live view of the camera in the customer's face is actually trying to lay foundation for a legal defense that that they weren't secretly recording people, for the inevitable scandal over a data breach/mishandling/misuse.

(Lawmakers and state AGs should be all over this, because history is clear that very few companies take data capture and handling responsibility seriously, unless it's heavily regulated, with teeth that hurt, and maybe not even then.)

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

#165

Post by darawk »

almost_usual wrote: post #155
yreg wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mean quality of life is sky high compared to 100 years ago and it is such thanks to the advancement made.

And as the Earth burns away and we choke on the smoke we rejoice as we have our AI entertainment and we can go quietly into the night.

Lol. Nobody is choking on smoke. The earth is fine. Humans may make life slightly more difficult for themselves in the next century or two due to global warming, but those difficulties will be more than offset by advances in technology, even under pessimistic assumptions.

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

#166

Post by alluro2 »

vwcx wrote: post #43
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?

> significant power over the system they operated that's such a great observation. Nowadays, when emailing support for a company like Ryobi or Breville, the human's response (through a Salesforce queue, no doubt) is always so helpless. They literally have no ability (nor knowledge?) to deviate from the corporate prescribed path and actually solve the problem. Same goes for a large car dealer's service dept. There's j…

That's a good point - the current drive to replace human customer service is a second step, after cutting off their ability / power to do anything that's not on the prescribed path.

Companies don't want to deal with customers. It's only the missing automation why the human CSRs are still a thing. If you can replace them with AI and automate handling of all customer support paths that company considers relevant, that's it, all other edge-cases, bizarre problems etc are just not considered. Which I understand to some extent, given the sheer idiocy you sometimes encounter from the customers.

The problem is that companies are also grossly over-confident in their products/services and ability to recognize all the scenarios.

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

#167

Post by twoodfin »

cdot2 wrote: post #80
littlestymaar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already tried by not raising inflation-adjusted wages for 50 years, and the solution to that problem was: lower the interest rate and push people to borrow to consume.

Inflation adjusted income has risen pretty consistently. The stat people sometimes cite for that is household income which has more to do with changes in average household size rather than changes in wages

Real disposable personal income per capita (which accounts for government transfers & subsidies, hence the big Covid spike) has also been on a steady incline.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0

Median household income has doubled since only 1994.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...

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

#168

Post by didibus »

digdugdirk wrote: post #152
yreg wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mean quality of life is sky high compared to 100 years ago and it is such thanks to the advancement made.

The mean quality of life is irrelevant if the mode quality of life is only a tenth of that.

And honestly the range matters a lot here as well. The mean just isn't a useful metric for human emancipation.

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

#169

Post by techsupporter »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #141
techsupporter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my experience, most stores are finding a reasonable balance. I hope you're right but this hasn't been the case at the grocery stores around me. QFC (a Kroger-owned brand in the Pacific Northwest) has, at least at two I usually frequent, stopped staffing checklanes after 8 or 9pm. It's self-checkout only. These are at stores that have a lot of signage advertising that "summer hours are here, all locations open un…

Self-service checkout at the store exit is such a wasted opportunity. In my (non-USA) grocery store I can scan product with my phone while I'm walking through the store and putting them in the cart; afterwards I only have to pay. Not having to take everything from my cart, scan it and put it back saves quite some time, even compared to cashiers scanning. There's also a handheld scanner for people that can't or don't…

We used to have that, at QFC/Kroger funny enough.

They got rid of it because few people used it (I tried it and it was very clunky) and replaced it with more self checkout lanes.

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

#170

Post by vikinghckr »

digdugdirk wrote: post #152
yreg wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mean quality of life is sky high compared to 100 years ago and it is such thanks to the advancement made.

The mean quality of life is irrelevant if the mode quality of life is only a tenth of that.

The median quality of life is MUCH higher today than 100 years ago. And bottom 1%-tile quality of life might be 1000 times better. All thanks to advance in technology and increased productivity.
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