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

thedeepdive.ca

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

#411
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Hopefully the costumers will rewards companies with better customer service. That assumes people will recognize those companies and pay a premium for their services.

If a company has really good products that never have issues, who would ever know whether they have good customer service?

I kid, sort of, but I've seen awfully expensive equipment in use for years before anyone really stress tests the vendor support, and so much of reputation is just advertisements and luck. And the quality of support seems to change pretty quickly... though usually for the worse...

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the best of both worlds: American employment while living in Canada. But yeah, I’ve worked for ridiculously cheap companies before here. Some who are well-known to conspire with local competitors not to poach each other’s employees to keep salaries down.

> Or the best of both worlds: American employment while living in Canada. But then wouldn't you get double dipped on taxes?

Nope. In my case I’m paid Canadian dollars and receive a T4 and am not on the radar at all for US taxes.

I think there’s a lot of ways for it to be handled.

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

#413
post #205

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.

what's the point in education if the AI does everything?

all employment, music, art, ...

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

#414
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.

> esp. those in the tech community

It’s a vocal minority of the tech community that shares that opinion. The silent majority knows it’s just fud marketing. Personally when i encounter a customer support chat bit i immediately assume low quality services and products. When i meet a software engineer blown away but chatgpt’s “coding skills” i assume that engineer is not particularly competent. There are valid use cases and the tech has obviously got potential but we are not there yet.

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the plan is screwing over the company you're buying goods from? Where can I like and subscribe for more of these amazing life hacks? (/s)

this isn’t mom&pop shops, these are big business who spent a lifetime stealing whenever they can and are now not even having workers check people out but we as shoppers should be honest…

The thing is, these stores budget for loss (shrink).

The problem is when they go over this budget, the store will need to reduce costs to cover their larger shrink budget.

The largest cost for stores is employees.

The executives and corporate don't lose hours, the low level employees do.

You might think you are sticking it to the man, but in reality you are screwing over the low level employees

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much is stopping you from living in a log cabin in the woods.

The government will reclaim the land unless I pay for it with money I make from the system. It’s not possible to opt out anymore. They stole the land too but my guns are smaller. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/matthew-clarke-youtube-...

You could work at a job and then buy land outside a city, thus beating the system. This is something other people have done.

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

#417
Who was calling customer service to begin with? I’m not a user, but I suspect there’s more margin with customers who are large enough to have a firm or internal team handle Shopify for them, and that’s not the type of person (one would hope) that would call customer service unless there was an account-level issue. If that’s the case, then they are simply evolving away from the mom-and-pop priority that made it so popular to begin with :(

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

#418

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.

I think AI will be less like the Industrial Revolution and more like a country finding large oil reserves.

Countries with strong social institutions like Norway do an amazing job of distributing the gains from finding oil.

Countries with poor social institutions (basically all of the developing world) end up enriching a small minority with the oil money. Even Canada doesn’t do a very good job of improving the lives of its citizens with its oil money.

Given the way the Western world has been going in terms of wealth consolidation, I am not optimistic about broad segments of the population seeing the benefits of AI.

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

#419
post #361
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.

Anyone who has ever interacted with a tier 1 customer service agent in an outsourced support farm knows the difference between that and a chat bot is negligible. True technical support can't be replaced yet, but thousands upon thousands of tier 1 human drones can be.

> True technical support can't be replaced yet, but thousands upon thousands of tier 1 human drones can be.

I disagree. Those agents are useless by design. They exist to do nothing in most cases, but none-the-less need to exist because of the regulatory + political + market backlash if they didn't.

Chatbots don't fulfill the core requirement of being able to tell regulators and juries that you did, in fact, have an employee look into the customer's issue.

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

#420
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a cake delivered upside down. So convenient.

Free upside down cake! Sounds like a winner. (I only trust grocery delivery for things in impervious packaging or impossible to screw up).

It wasn't free! And yeah, it wasn't my idea to put a cake into the grocery order. I also don't trust anybody else to pick out fresh fruit & veg for me.
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