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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

#371

Post by mupuff1234 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #363
mupuff1234 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In practice, places will ignore that it doesn't work for everything, cut off any sort of physical call centers, and then people just end up fed up with their services. I absolutely hate places aggressively adopting chatbots and phone bots.

Perhaps, but that's also true with physical call centers, some of them are helpful and some are hell.

Hopefully the costumers will rewards companies with better customer service.

A good company will provide a good chat bot that will make it immediately clear when it can help and when it can't, with a clear and simple way to contact a human if needed.

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

#372

Post by m463 »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #357
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.

I have seen that businesses over the last couple of years HAVE replaced some or all people.

With amazon, I used to be able to email someone. Now I cannot. I have been forced to use a chat session. The chat session is partially automated. It could be completely automated, and I don't know if people will always be able to tell the difference.

Tesla basically forces all service calls to the tesla mobile app.

Getting a hotel is similar. web pages and phone calls are a minefield of dark patterns, where the customer is worn down and worn out by automated systems.

There are exceptions, but it is a supreme battle of will and patience.

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

#373

Post by bombcar »

badrequest wrote: post #116
codetrotter wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

American produce aisles have these as well, but now I have to create the waste of a printed sticker and most likely a bag as well to get groceries I could have otherwise purchased by weight.

I wish a grocery store would understand "tare" correctly and let me have barcoded and labelled reusable containers - fill the potato bag with potatoes, scan and weight the filled bag and be on my way.

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

#374

Post by 8note »

throwaway4233 wrote: post #352
indy wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This gives me the sense there's a nice training set, and a fairly clear way to measure the AI's performance. "It will get better in X years" sounds very likely

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

#375

Post by CBarkleyU »

didibus wrote: post #311
diatone wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth pointing out, we live better lives not just from the technological breakthroughs, but also from the social movements that have brought us things like the 40-hour work week and keeping children from labour for a reasonable time. Which were direct responses to the Industrial Revolution.

This is an incredibly relevant point. Take North Korea, they have access the the know how of all the same advancements and yet because of social conditions, it's population is not thriving. This is true of many countries honestly. The impact of social justice, equality, and all that are huge. And can't be understated. In fact, we can all easily imagine an Elite ruling the world at the helm of AI powered robots, leavi…

>Social breakthroughs are going to need to keep pace with technological advancements, otherwise those same advancement can also help to bring minority holding power even more stronghold on the rest.

Which is why we should push for social breakthroughs instead of hindering technological advancements. Work for the sake of working is just occupational therapy, nothing more.

I'm extremely optimistic regarding all this AI kerfuffle. "In fact, we can all easily imagine an Elite ruling the world at the helm of AI powered robots", yeah, sure, we can. We can also easily imagine us sharpening the good old guillotine.

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

#376

Post by rchaud »

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 always talk to every potential renter on the phone. I feel I can discern a lot about someone from a phone call." Meanwhile, younger folks generally despised having to talk to someone on the phone

This works when the things you are purchasing are uncomplicated, like a toaster or a streaming subscription. Younger folks will realize that big-ticket purchases are precisely the kind of things that you will want to have some kind of human involved on the other side for when things go wrong.

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

#377

Post by ZephyrBlu »

nverno wrote: post #276
vikinghckr wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I've spent the best years of my life living in the woods and in wall-less huts w/ no water, plumbing or electricity. Imho our modern conveniences don't make life any richer, and in many cases take away the pleasure of things we take for granted. If I had medical problems I would probably feel differently.

I feel like you are probably taking a lot of things for granted. Clothes, food, equipment, vehicles, etc. Heck, even just the ability to choose to live in a hut in the woods.

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

#378

Post by frontalier »

0xDEF wrote: post #333
cm2012 wrote: post #35

This is good for society just like any productivity enhancing invention. You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation improving per-human output.

>You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation Since 2013 this site has not been the optimistic hacker/startup forum Paul Graham envisioned in 2007. For a decade it has just been a higher quality version of r/technology but with the same reddit-tier doomposting.

What happened in 2013 for things to change?

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

#379

Post by bombcar »

azherebtsov wrote: post #360
Cyberdog wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

I've noticed the self-checkouts seem to have some safeties in place which the normal cashiered checkouts don't (because they assume the cashier is trained). For example, if I buy ten cans of the same soup, the cashier's system seems to let her scan one can ten times, whereas I can't do the same on the self-checkout, even the Walmart ones that don't care about the weight being placed. They have a "prevent double-scan" delay built in that is long enough I may as well grab the next can.

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

#380

Post by WhackyIdeas »

At least their chatbots might be better than the ‘humans’ we spoke to a few years ago at Shopify.

Atrocious company, zero ethics then and zero ethics now it appears.

We moved to Wordpress/Woocommerce and have never regretted it for a second. Well, I lie… we regret ever trying wordpress.com (they are short on ethics too, such as entering and walking around your house uninvited… like the orders screen of our back-end!).

Long story short: these big e-shop hosters seem to share something in common - Twattery.

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