Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by coryrc » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 9:01 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #165

almost_usual wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one except most Canadians, the West Coast, Midwest, and Northeast of the US.

And Texas too apparently: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/environm...

Is there anywhere in the continental US not affected by wildfire smoke? Hawaii is probably doing alright.

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

#182

Post by Modified3019 » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

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…

I’ve found it heavily depends on the system the store uses and if improvements are actively made.

Walmart’s self-checkouts are great, and I’ve noticed distinct improvements over the years, reducing or removing common sources of issues.

WinCo’s on the other hand have been and continue to be prone to becoming a pain in the ass requiring multiple employee interventions.

I personally hate interaction at grocery stores, I want to get in and gtfo and not hold up the people behind me.

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

#183

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #156

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…

> Of course, would actually have preferred if I could have just completed the change online. It's so interesting to me how generational this is, and how it changed so quickly. I used to work in something tangentially related to real estate. The sellers/landlords tended to all be older (50+, this was about 10 years ago), while the renters/some buyers tended to be millennials and younger. The older folks went apoplecti…

Trust me. Every few weeks I hear a complaint from my dad that he can't just go into an office or directly get someone on the phone to make some change. (And I'm certainly not a millennial.) At some level he just resents he needs to do this stuff on a computer. I'm annoyed when I can't reach someone in the event of a problem but I am totally cool with transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system.

I do talk with certain advisors in person and we even share various personal info about what's going on--but most routine things are email.

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

#184

Post by xmprt » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #156

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…

> Of course, would actually have preferred if I could have just completed the change online. It's so interesting to me how generational this is, and how it changed so quickly. I used to work in something tangentially related to real estate. The sellers/landlords tended to all be older (50+, this was about 10 years ago), while the renters/some buyers tended to be millennials and younger. The older folks went apoplecti…

I'm not sure you can call it a change of opinion when the older generation grew up where phone was the only option. So it sounds more like each generation prefers the method that they grew up with. If in the future everyone ends up doing work in the "Metaverse" for some reason then I'm sure the current online generation would hate it even more. I can't think of a good reason to do anything in the metaverse but maybe the next generation will find a way to make it work.

For similar reasons, a lot of people on Hackernews prefer reading articles rather than watching videos whereas a lot of newer programmers learn a lot from videos more so than books and articles.

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

#185

Post by jeezfrk » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #165

almost_usual wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Erm. We are choking on smoke.

Its also the case that HappyMemes are very much as profitable (if not more) as home air filters.

Liars may not know they are part of the zombie horde .... but they do their master's will anyway.

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

#186

Post by Cyberdog » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #75

ghaff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grocery stores and others absolutely still need cashier checkout. If I have a handful of items I can barcode swipe and even a couple pieces of produce that's fine. But they simply aren't designed for a full shopping cart which includes a ton of non-barcoded items. Ditto with home repair stores. Scan a new smoke detector? Sure. Check out a bunch of lumber etc. That would be no. In my experience, most stores are findin…

> 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.

> 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.

An experienced cashier knows what side and corner of the box of Wheaties the bar code is on without having to look, and has the produce code for the bananas memorized. If I have a lot of things, I always go to the cashier rather than the self-checkout. They can always do it faster than I can myself.

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

#187

Post by TheCleric » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 9:03 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #68

RugnirViking wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in theory: customer support automation frees up support workers from focusing on repetetive customer issues to being able to devote more time to those difficult issues, providing better service at lower cost in practise: have you ever used any automated customer support for anything? it speaks for itself - it's literally worse than nothing.

In practice I see a lot of businesses murdering their competition because they offer better customer service.

I will pay up to 100% markup on things if:

1) I know there's a chance I'll need customer service with that thing 2) The company I'm buying from has actually good customer service.

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

#188

Post by foobiekr » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 9:03 PM UTC

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…

It's also pretty terrible at non-generic-webcrap coding.

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

#189

Post by precompute » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 9:03 PM UTC

gremlinsinc wrote: post #63

davb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the people building the shite customer service chatbots that we all hate using should take a stand.

no the govt should just pay ubi because we're at the point of needing it. it'll only get worse. Businesses should automate so people are needed for less menial stuff and can just enjoy life and shit. Not far from now even intellectual jobs will be a.i. post scarcity star Trek civilization is very possible if we stop letting greed control us. disclaimer : I run an ai automation agency, and support the fight against po…

There will be a war, not UBI. UBI the way AI safety guys want it is never ever happening.

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

#190

Post by emporas » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 9:04 PM UTC

indy wrote: post #64

BigBalli wrote: post #56

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

Exactly, almost everyone who reads Hacker News have built their careers on technological progress. Outrage now that it's coming after their jobs just rings hollow.

New jobs are possible however.

Given the state of A.I. even today, which is not that advanced, we need one terabyte per day or per week for training purposes. Someone has to produce that data and combine human made data with machine generated data. Synthetic data like that will be fed into ML algorithms.

That simple process, in my calculations, will be the biggest industry on the planet by 2030. The data has to grow 1000x every three years or so. So this industry will end unemployment worldwide, for every person on the planet and also all ages.