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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

#351

Post by carapace »

ghaff wrote: post #104
sokoloff wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm in favor of letting the machines do the shit work to free us up to do things like parenting, gardening, local politics, etc.

My point is that a corp or org that thinks of dealing with it's customers as a bullshit job is probably not one you want to patronize.

If I were running a company the folks that talk directly to the customers would be pretty high status.

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

#352

Post by throwaway4233 »

indy wrote: post #285
data-ottawa wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have talked to customers using the product my company was selling and this was as an engineer who worked on that specific tool. The hardest part in this process was trying to understand what exact issue the customer faced, since as an engineer and someone who built the tool, I am completely aware of how it works. The customer is not and they might not be in the proper mood to even consider learning through it step by step. My respect for what the customer support people did immediately went up a lot, after sitting through a few calls.

Customer support execs in most companies at least either have documentation or enough experience to understand where the customer is heading with the discussion and resolve problems quicker. Most customers especially larger ones would have account executives who are aware of the customer's needs and personalities and how to deal with them/help them.

I do not think an AI chatbot can replace that, at least as of now. And for those, quoting `it will get better in x years`, do note that those entities who have resources to fund such researches and improve things are slowly evolving from research first to profit first, which means we might not get the AI future we want, but what they want.

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

#353

Post by CoastalCoder »

ChumpGPT wrote: post #139

>These job cuts, according to the employee, were driven not merely by a CEO’s misguided “bet,” but rather a shift towards replacing full-time employees with cheaper contract labor Good Lord, how much cheaper can you get than Canadian labor? They already get paid poorly and earn about 1/2 or less than their US counterparts. I guess the lack of jobs is why they can pay so little, explains why so many Canadians flee to…

Funny, just yesterday I watched a Corner Gas episode about bringing a call center to Dog River.

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

#354

Post by bombcar »

morkalork wrote: post #341
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…

I watched someone try taking a freaking step ladder through the self check out and the machine scanned it okay but then wouldn't proceed to the next item or cash out because "item must be placed on scale". Really?

It really comes down to how the store has them tuned; one local grocery store's system freaks out if a fly lands on the scale, whereas the local Walmart doesn't seem to care if the weight is ten pounds more or less than what it thinks it should be.

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

#355

Post by alpaca128 »

indy wrote: post #205
alluro2 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the socioeconomic utopia we'll build in the meantime?

In the fact that AI is the only realistic path we have of providing every human being on the planet with the best health care and education.

Technical solutions for societal issues don't have the best track record. Providing healthcare and education to everyone needs the right incentives, not technology that could theoretically help if greed spontaneously ceased to exist.

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

#356

Post by adhesive_wombat »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #292
ghaff wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I think your examples also highlight the issue at hand - the automated systems are great when they work, but when they don't work it means that there are now a lot fewer real humans that can solve your problem. Take travel bookings. When I know where I'm going and have relatively firm dates, I'd much prefer the ease of online booking. However, when I'm more in the mood of "I want to go on vacation to country X, but I…

Time was, that travel agent was pretty much your only option, unless you happened to have extremely well-traveled friends or family who could make an itinerary with you. Even finding a list of which airlines fly from where to where and the visa processes was a major hassle. Let alone making a connection at the other end. How would you even get a regional Italian train timetable without the internet? At least it would take an afternoon on the phone.

And if your local agents weren't good at it, or they only knew about, say, Spain in detail and not Italy, you'd be pretty out of luck.

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

#357

Post by mupuff1234 »

sharts wrote: post #340

Anyone that has ever interacted with a customer service chat bot knows this is pretty stupid. I’m not sure why people (esp. those in the tech community) think we have evolved the technology in any meaningful enough way to replace people yet. How do we know this? Those same people would be against AI chatbots replacing their children’s teachers.

It doesn't have to replace all people, just good enough to replace the more common cases.

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

#358

Post by bombcar »

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…

In america we seem to be headed toward individually wrapping everything in plastic.

I'm not going to be surprised when I see individual onions in plastic, or blueberries by the berry. Potatoes and corn have already fallen.

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

#359

Post by coev »

smt88 wrote: post #84
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…

So far, I've never seen a Publix with even a single self-checkout. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they're rolling them out much more slowly than the other stores. This is likely because Publix is 80% employee-owned[1]. 1. https://fourweekmba.com/who-owns-publix/#:~:text=Key%20takea... .

Palm Beach, Florida. The stores in the nearby less affluent neighborhoods don't have it.

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

#360

Post by azherebtsov »

Cyberdog wrote: post #186
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.

> 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 f…

When self checkout desks were setup in my grocery store, there were 2 cashiers and 3 self service points. The queues to cashiers are different, but there is a single queue to self service. After a few observations I found that longer queue to selfservice usually goes faster. Probably because of two reasons:

1. There is one more cashdesk in there 2. The payments are done by card, whereas there those who pays in cash to the cashiers

In general cashier, of course, faster than a customer in operating goods. But there are other slow processes involved. Like: loading goods on the tape (not present in selfservice), paying with cash (some advanced selfservice desks have that though), packing goods into bag (could be done right after scanning in selfservice)

P.s: the location of a barcode on a box almost does not matter with a good scanners doing scans in two dimensions

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