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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

#281

Post by asdf6677 »

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 and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

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

#282

Post by JimtheCoder »

Loquebantur wrote: post #258
bushbaba wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any such post-AI jobs are predicated on there being a difference between AI and humans in favor of the latter. I presume, you imagine large parts of the population will be happy working in the sex industry or similar? People's irrational assumption, the past could always be linearly extrapolated into the future is remarkably out of place when it comes to the epitome of non-linearity, intelligent consciousness.

"you imagine large parts of the population will be happy working in the sex industry"

About 50% might think it's cool for a while...

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

#283

Post by ghaff »

eastof wrote: post #264
ghaff wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

>Could you give an example of "transactions happening easily and reliably through a computer system"?

Sure. A random travel booking. A stock purchase. Checking my account balance anywhere.

These are all things that took visiting travel agents, brokers, and waiting for delayed monthly statements previously. We made a lot of phone calls and went into offices for multiple hours to handle things.

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

#284

Post by tempodox »

cm2012 wrote: post #54
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.

Phone tree support is awful. AI of GPT4 level works because it is 100x better than that. And it will only get better in the next 5 years.

Promises, promises. They remind me of how cryptocurrencies were going to make everything better. “Just wait another 5 years and you'll see.”

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

#285

Post by indy »

data-ottawa wrote: post #263
indy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Yes, the AI chatbot will fill that role.

It will answer questions that customers have and then it will feedback to the product team about the most common queries made by customers.

Honestly, the Hacker News crowd have been such visionaries about the potential for technology but as soon as that technology infringes upon their livelihood they develop these massive blind spots.

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

#286

Post by hwillis »

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.

> You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution.

Says who? What jobs did the industrial revolution eliminate? Essentially just spinners and weavers, and that caused a violent social uprising by the Luddites.

Textiles were far outweighed by the industrialization of steam power, ironworking, and machine tools. Those three things did not put people out of jobs, they just created huge numbers of new jobs and totally altered society.

I don't think anybody really believes AI will directly create new jobs, in any way comparable to steam or steel. They think it will be like textiles, but everywhere and without the balancing impact of those massive, unrelated new industries.

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

#287

Post by nverno »

awwaiid wrote: post #248
nverno wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can do this right now! It's called "Alaska".

I do hope to end up there eventually, but I think the government ended homesteading back in the 80s sadly.

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

#288

Post by the_only_law »

fifteen1506 wrote: post #122

I thought they were all like family? Seriously though, what are the mental implications of surprise layoffs? You stop trusting everyone's word, specially when you're just a number? How does a structured capitalist society hold with this? Or you just double-down on the false belief those fired deserved it?

> I thought they were all like family?

Heh to be fair, I’ve seen family screw each other over plenty of times.

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

#289

Post by theptip »

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 would not bet my brand on generative AI being ready to handle customer-facing conversations without supervision.

Seems insane. But hey, maybe the ROI is there for replacing frontline support. It’s lower quality but way lower price, so you can afford to escalate to a human quicker?

Just to steelman, if I could easily and instantly talk to a support chatbot that was somewhat knowledgeable about the product lineup, it might be useful. Better than the Intercom chat box where the human replies to you in 2-10 hours.

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

#290

Post by dfox »

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…

This was common in Czech Republic, but the large stores switched back to weighting at the cashier checkout. I assume that the way how the consumer-facing scales are connected to the rest of the store's system has something to do with the stores wanting to eliminate it (different vendors and the backend interface typically involves shuffling CSV files around over FTP or SMB). Obviously, with the variations of borrow a scanner (Typically Zebra MC17/MC18/PS20)/scan by mobile application they had to reintroduce the scales back, so now they are somewhat stuck in supporting both of these processes. And well, I became so accustomed to scanning things myself as I put them into the cart that for me and large grocery purchases the only real alternative for that is not going to the store at all and ordering it online.
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