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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

#551
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.

Nope, the same people would recognize that AI chatbots are the best thing coming for education in a century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

IFF they produce facts and only facts they would STILL fail at their goal, because education is the transmission of virtue and machines cannot be virtuous.

As a lossy interface on top of the global library that is the internet LLMs do just fine.

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

#552
post #529
post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's a TAM. And yes, it's insane. His offical purpose is to help you out. His real purpose is to help AWS out by delaying, stalling, referencing to wrong documentation, making you run in circles etc. The harder it is for you to get some real support, the better he is at his real job. Its a crazy incentive and I'm not even sure if you can evaluate your TAM. My current manager plays softball with them for unkno…

I don’t get it: how does AWS benefit if the TAM delays resolving the ticket/

AWS doesn't benefit from them resolving the ticket in a timely manner... or at all. AWS benefits from being able to put someone in between the customer and the rest of the company. It's like a layer of insulation, that prevents the customer from actually inconveniencing the business or any of the other people who work there.

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

#553
post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you need to issue charge backs you shouldn't be using them. Painful lesson but call the restaurant. Call a cab. Go to the store yourself. Your modern society is a wasteland to be avoided.

I'm not sure how you want a disabled person to go to the store themselves when they're physically unable to walk, but where services are convenient for the able-bodied and minded, they're literally lifeblood for the disabled. Modern society can be avoided by those with that privilege, but for the rest of us, it's the one we've got.

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

#554
post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to issue charge backs you shouldn't be using them. Painful lesson but call the restaurant. Call a cab. Go to the store yourself. Your modern society is a wasteland to be avoided.

I'm not sure how you want a disabled person to go to the store themselves when they're physically unable to walk, but where services are convenient for the able-bodied and minded, they're literally lifeblood for the disabled. Modern society can be avoided by those with that privilege, but for the rest of us, it's the one we've got.

It takes privilege to be able to afford those luxuries that I can assure you many disabled individuals cannot afford. Those without get by with help from others.

Cabs are more popular with the disabled over Uber because the driver will get out and help seeking a better tip. Calling a restaurant vs using UberEats app is easier for some types of disabilities and easier for the elderly. Many disabled can go shopping or have government services to physically go for them.

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

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. When I tried it (using GPT4), and told it "but won't that leak memory because we're not removing the other listener?", it gave me: const EventEmitter = require('events'); let eventEmitter = new EventEmitter(); function eventPromise(eventEmitter, eventName) { return new Promise((resolve, reject) => { const successHandler = (data) => { eventEmitter.off('error', errorHandler); resolve(data); }; const errorH…

Kind of: The point is making it find and correct the mistake itself, instead of spelling out the fix. We want it to replace a competent coder who can do code reviews by themselves, rather than just being a fancy input method that turns English into code. That said, sometimes you can even get it to write correct code on the first try. It's completely random.

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

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in the US, certain companies (like Discover) had customer service which were a joy to interact with. An almost immediate connect with a human, who had the permissions to make a relatively large chunk of problems go away / actually have the right information at hand without having to transfer or hold the call. I would not hesitate to do business with them again if I could. Good customer service inspires loy…

I've had this experience with Ally bank. Their SMS-only 2FA, lack of international wire transfers, and compete failure to work with Plaid drive me insane, but I'm still using them because I get a kind, helpful human every time I call.

Except when it is not. With Ally customer service - I was once on hold for more than hour before I could speak to an agent. Not the ideal scenario - and their backend systems were not even able to resolve my issue even after multiple calls.

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

#557
post #3

If you work with AI, it's on you to refuse those jobs.

Fuck off. Automation is the only thing that increases real wealth over the long term. All jobs should be done by machines.

Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

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

#558
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now do Beijing.

Damn, the wheels on those goalposts must be diesel-powered.

“It’s less smoggy in LA.” Is the “it works on my machine” of climate change denial.

It’s a global problem, and acknowledging that isn’t moving the goal posts. It’s reminding you that a first down is not a touchdown.

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

#559

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…

As someone who's worked in customer service: you would not believe the number of people who contact customer service with "I've lost my password", even though there is a "lost password" link right on the login page. These people are helped by the service agent following a script and clicking the link on their behalf. This is what the AI will replace. For many businesses it's not profitable to serve customers whose is…

> "I've lost my password"

IMHO, this is the main reason L1 support "sucks" so much. Having been a support guy in a previous life, nothing feels worse than skipping the annoying trivial question (e.g did you install the software after diwnloading it?) only to find out after 25 minutes of debugging that they, in fact, did not actually install the software. That particular call started with "all I see are codes" as the opening line. Had I asked if they'd installed the web application on their server instead of extracting random .js and .aspx files and double-clicking on them in Explorer, I could have saved everyone a lot of time.

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

#560

If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work. If you're really dreaming for AI that can wipe-out entire classes of decent middle-class jobs in one big swing, don't forge…

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.

In practice so far, socialized economy is barbarism.

But next time will be different due to .... magical AI god?

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