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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

#261

Post by chc »

monero-xmr wrote: post #208
usednet wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logical conclusion that people don’t like to hear is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy. AI will, in the not so distant future, eliminate the vast majority of jobs. The choice will then be between a socialized economy or barbarism.

[flagged]

Why do you think that? To the extent that a correlation exists between the level of social benefits offered by a country and the amount of horrors committed by its government, I would expect it to go the opposite direction (i.e. brutal dictators are more likely to hoard resources than share them freely). I have heard some attempts to substantively make the argument that socialized economies lead to brutality before, but every one I have seen has relied on a pretty blatant sleight of hand where laissez-faire economics is conflated with democracy. If you're aware of an analysis that does an apples to apples comparison and comes to that conclusion, that would be very interesting.

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

#262

Post by jacquesm »

bushbaba wrote: post #234
usednet wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logical conclusion that people don’t like to hear is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy. AI will, in the not so distant future, eliminate the vast majority of jobs. The choice will then be between a socialized economy or barbarism.

Totally disagree. You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yet here we are living better lives from the technological breakthroughs. AI will just usher the next industrial revolution of the modern era.

There is absolutely no guarantee that what worked for the industrial revolution will be repeated for the AI revolution. None. At. All. It might be. But there are a ton of ways in which this could result in some very serious problems for which we currently do not have any solutions. Making the assumption that because something worked the last time it will work this time as well given the same circumstances is simply wrong. Even if - and that is a pretty big if - the circumstances around such revolution would be identical there are many ways in which it could have played out differently. The outcome of this is at this point in time unknowable, so you can't make any claims about what it will be like if and when it happens.

Maybe you're right. But consider the possibility that you are wrong and what the various bad outcomes could be and maybe then you'll at least make some kind of qualification to that statement.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrospective_determinism

Also note that the industrial revolution was a turning point and not necessarily a good one for everybody that was alive back then, and that there are plenty of bad effects from it into today.

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

#263

Post by data-ottawa »

indy wrote: post #126
mike_hock wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"read off a script and can't fix anything" has been a hallmark of customer service for the past 20 years. If anything, the shift to AI offers a path away from this and towards offering actually useful feedback. Would anyone whose been keeping up with LLM progress be surprised if within the next 3 years all AI powered call centers are significantly more useful than all of the current call centers?

AI can answer questions cheaper, but can it address real problems?

I worked at Shopify when it was much smaller, it was fairly common for support staff to reach out with questions for the product team which drive fixing bugs or improving features.

How can the AI chatbot fill that role? It’s a gap that offshoring/disintegrating support creates.

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

#264

Post by eastof »

ghaff wrote: post #183
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 syste…

I guess I'm against the trend since I'm a gen z who also vastly prefers a phone call to online. Computer systems IME are riddled with dark patterns, bugs, ads, and terrible UIs that make it nearly impossible to figure out where to go to solve my problem. Could you give an example of "transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system"?

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

#265

Post by vikinghckr »

nverno wrote: post #253
vikinghckr wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for a start, it's safe to assume you're not a woman or a minority. And even if you're a young healthy white male, your quality of life would be significantly worse in the 1820s. Not only would you lose access to a lot of the everyday conveniences of life today, you're also far more likely to die a young and painful death from any number of disease.

Conveniences don't make life worth living, and a long life doesn't mean a good life. Do you really think people, on average, enjoyed their lives less back then? I don't

Well, enjoyment or happiness is tricky to measure because happiness = reality - expectation. So people in the 1820s might've been "happy" enough because they simply didn't know a better life like today's was a possibility. There's no reason to think they were happier than today's population though. And certainly, you as someone who experienced today's conveniences will not be happy long term if all those were taken away suddenly.

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

#266

Post by gus_massa »

nverno wrote: post #215
vikinghckr wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That this even needed to be said on a forum like HN baffles me. I suspect it's a result of decades of mainstream political/cultural doom-and-gloom propaganda.

This quality of life metric is purely economic, but it is easy to read it as general life quality- personally, I'd swap now for 1820s homesteading out west in a heartbeat even though that would register as 'extreme poverty' on the economic scale.

Refrigerators. Just imagine your life without a refrigerator. If you go to 1820 you will have no refrigerator. From https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/worldwide-ave... , now the 80% of the homes in the world have a refrigerator.

[And 50% have a washing machine. Mine broke a few months and it was a big mess until we got a new one.]

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

#267

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

bushbaba wrote: post #234
usednet wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logical conclusion that people don’t like to hear is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy. AI will, in the not so distant future, eliminate the vast majority of jobs. The choice will then be between a socialized economy or barbarism.

Totally disagree. You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yet here we are living better lives from the technological breakthroughs. AI will just usher the next industrial revolution of the modern era.

The industrial revolution was also a period of incredible misery for a significant portion of the population. Without legal protection, and a strong social/political system, whole segments of the population were subject to poverty and filth.

The technological breakthroughs were great and we reap their benefits everyday. But, there was a lot more than simple technological revolution to get to the point where the majority of the population were no longer subject to immiseration at the behest of profit. There were a lot of hard legal and political arguments that had to end up on the side of labour to also give us the life of relative leisure we have now.

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

#268

Post by diatone »

nverno wrote: post #199
jarjoura wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, economists are now saying that the 20th century was an anomaly in terms of QoL and we're reverting back to U shaped distribution of wealth. It will be very interesting times when all that 20th century earned Baby Boomer wealth moves to the next generation and accelerates the shift even faster.

Do you mean U-shaped on a wealth vs. age graph, or something else? I would imagine wealth distribution to look more like an exponential distribution.

Frequency distribution I think - normal, not uniform.

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

#269

Post by mschild »

bushbaba wrote: post #234
usednet wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logical conclusion that people don’t like to hear is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy. AI will, in the not so distant future, eliminate the vast majority of jobs. The choice will then be between a socialized economy or barbarism.

Totally disagree. You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yet here we are living better lives from the technological breakthroughs. AI will just usher the next industrial revolution of the modern era.

Sure, there's plenty of positives that came out of it, but lets not forget the downsides and the, quite literally, bloody struggles people had to go through to arrive where we are today.

Working conditions were for quite a long time absolutely horrendous. Child labour went from helping your parents on the farm to working in dangerous factories for 12 hour shifts.

Massive amounts of pollution, which we are seeing the effects of today, and that doesn't only include CO2 emissions.

Ideally, AI would help humanity work less or achieve more with less effort, but we both know that's not how corporations function. When there is more profit to be made, or money to be saved, they will.

AI will cost people jobs. Funnily enough, its trade jobs that are probably the safest from all these changes.

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

#270

Post by solardev »

usednet wrote: post #174
jarjoura wrote: post #134

If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work. If you're really dreaming for AI that can wipe-out entire classes of decent middle-class jobs in one big swing, don't forge…

The logical conclusion that people don’t like to hear is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy. AI will, in the not so distant future, eliminate the vast majority of jobs. The choice will then be between a socialized economy or barbarism.

Barbarism usually wins. It always has so far.
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