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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

#481

Post by johnnyworker »

dikaio wrote: post #471
johnnyworker wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked in a call center as tech support for an ISP that also did phone and TV. One day a women called about her continuing problems with the phone service crapping out. She had been in contact with us for months, and at some point she said she got the feeling people didn't take her seriously because she was a woman. She was a widow who was taking care of her 40 year old heavily disabled son, where any second t…

There’s so few people that would have done what you did. In my experience, most customer service reps want to complete their tickets as quickly as possible to meet the companies quotas. When you run into reps as yourself it’s so refreshing. 10 years ago this lack of customer service was rare, businesses tried to provide the best customer service as possible but now you get companies that seemingly chose to avoid prov…

> In my experience, most customer service reps want to complete their tickets as quickly as possible to meet the companies quotas.

Yes, that's kinda of how that customer ended up in that situation. But most of that comes from the quotas etc., and AI will be 100% aligned with those.

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

#482

Post by raincole »

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…

> about 1/2 or less than their US counterparts

And how much relative to their Indian counterparts? This thread is about customer service.

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

#483

Post by fragmede »

martin8412 wrote: post #474
dreamcompiler wrote: post #446

After a recent horrible experience with JetBlue customer service, it has become obvious to me that the true purpose of all "customer service" at major companies is not "solve the customer's problem" but "make the customer go away." This seems to be true regardless of whether humans or robots are involved. If humans are involved they will be low-paid hourly workers on the other side of the planet, staring at the same…

All you need to do is to speak the magic codeword, charge back.

And then you can't use Uber, or Doordash, or Instacart. It works for single transaction merchants, but for platforms that having become critical to functioning in today's modern society, it's unfortunately not the magic password.

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

#484

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #473
dorkwood wrote: post #444

One great thing that came from the NFT gold-rush was that it exposed a lot of well-known figures as grifters -- Tobi, the Shopify CEO, being one of them. After that ordeal, this kind of thing doesn't surprise me in the least.

What kind of grifting did he do? The only crypto related information about him that’s readily available is that he joined the Coinbase board.

Tobi was part of the group which changed their name on twitter to name.eth. As soon as I saw his name as tobi.eth I added him to my block list of all the others who also changed their names as it was a very easy signal for me to know which people do not have original thinking and are grifters.

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

#485

Post by krainboltgreene »

indy wrote: post #91
krainboltgreene wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built careers on making labour easier, I want the result of that labour to benefit the workers, not the exceptionally short term vision of shareholders. Just because you can't understand why this affects your future doesn't mean it's hollow outrage.

If you think that AI only benefits shareholders then you're the one with exceptional short term vision. Broadening access to AI will massively benefit all humans

> If you think that AI only benefits shareholders then you're the one with exceptional short term vision.

You can't be so blind to history that you truly believe this, our present day is filled with examples of this not being true. You can directly look at literally any medical achievement that corporations own.

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

#486

Post by krainboltgreene »

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.

> In the fact

Just straight up not a fact.

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

#487

Post by krainboltgreene »

reducesuffering wrote: post #409
alpaca128 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your healthcare depends mostly on a solid foundation of technology. Otherwise everyone can have full access to all the witch doctors.

[flagged]

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

#488

Post by pjmlp »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #329
pjmlp wrote: post #51

This is just the start, just wait until most LLM can outperform junior devs on the quality of generated code.

Might be waiting a long time. Just like self driving cars, the last 1% is the most crucial and the hardest. Except of course LLM generated code is nowhere near the last 1%, and in any case very much misses what writing code is actually about - namely, communication with other humans.

That is what architects and business analysts do, so at least those jobs are safe for the foresable future.

The offshoring raw coding jobs, those will be outsourced to machines instead.

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

#489

Post by marcosdumay »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #456
marcosdumay wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the same happens for chat text interfaces, but I have used those much fewer times. People usually don't call the normal usable UI that solves problems "automated customer support", but if you refer to a navigable web site with real options to solving things, then well, you are offtopic but that one works.

It's not offtopic. Many people in this thread seem to think that any customer service UI that's powered by AI/LLMs has to present a chat/voice interface. It doesn't have to be this way.

Well, where else do you plan on using the AI? On search? (Yes, it would be an improvement, but search is not very far from chat.)

Automated customer service works exceptionally well if it's done with care and doesn't involve AIs. But we simply do not have any AI design that helps with it. All designs we have only hinder it.

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

#490

Post by y2hhcmxlcw »

pjmlp wrote: post #488
somewhereoutth wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be waiting a long time. Just like self driving cars, the last 1% is the most crucial and the hardest. Except of course LLM generated code is nowhere near the last 1%, and in any case very much misses what writing code is actually about - namely, communication with other humans.

That is what architects and business analysts do, so at least those jobs are safe for the foresable future. The offshoring raw coding jobs, those will be outsourced to machines instead.

I really relate to aspects of both of these comments above. 1. There is a last 1% problem, heck it's probably more like 10% problem with LLM generated code similar to the last mile problem with driverless cars. 2. The bigger thing that will impact the job market is, everyone, at global scale, is being told to learn to code. Every middle schooler in the US is seemingly assumed a failure by their school if they don't "learn to code". There will be so much exponential growth in junior devs over the coming years. Looking outside the US, software engineer salaries aren't that great. Can the US economy create an exponential number of high paying engineer jobs to offset the global exponential rise in qualified engineers trying to get those jobs? Companies will offshore via third parties like Accenture who will skim off the top the livable wage away from those people outside the US who Accenture offshores to, so even those people outside the US won't be winning. Any way you look at it, I believe there will be massive world wide pressure on US engineer jobs.
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