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White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

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Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#21

Post by aurareturn »

truetraveller wrote: post #18
aurareturn wrote: post #15

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was str…

"Top customer service" and AI do not mix. People hate an AI response more than a late, real response.

Don't get lost in the customer service example. Focus on the idea instead which can be applied to many other professions.

People thought AI being better than a human at reading medical images would put radiologists out of a job. But instead, radiologists had more demand than ever because it made getting a scan more affordable, more accurate which led to more customer demand.

Same can happen for customer service. AI makes customer service cheaper, better, faster. More companies offer good customer service in order to stay competitive. More customers demand customer service because it's better now and they expect it since all companies big or small can afford quality customer service.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#22

Post by fabian2k »

I think the argument here is a bit of a strawman, though there is a good point in there as well. AI will not automate all customer support, but it has the potential to automate a large fraction of it.

The anecdote in there is about complex B2B enterprise software. That's not the majority of customer support, and is very heavy on escalating to actual experts.

You don't have to remove 100% of the jobs to have huge effects. Automating large parts of a few sectors would already create significant disruptions.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#23

Post by exitb »

Madmallard wrote: post #5
robotswantdata wrote: post #2

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive. Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

Are you sure about that one? What exactly will these agents be able to do with enough consistency, accuracy, and reliability that people will want to hire them over humans? In my experience with even the most basic implementation of agents, i.e. customer service chat bots, I literally cannot stand interacting with them even once. They are extremely unhelpful and I will hang up or immediately ask to speak to a human.

Most support agents lack... well, agency. If you connect a chatbot to an FAQ, that's exactly what you get. Just another instance of enterprise software being badly designed, badly written etc. It doesn't mean that it's actually an impossible problem.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#24

Post by chinathrow »

truetraveller wrote: post #18
aurareturn wrote: post #15

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was str…

"Top customer service" and AI do not mix. People hate an AI response more than a late, real response.

You sure could let the agent try to do the task and supervise it before sending of replies to customers. Similar to as to that I still check the code produced by an agent.

If you remove the human from the loop in customer service, you won't gain a thing.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#25

Post by CodeCompost »

chrz wrote: post #14
robotswantdata wrote: post #2

The current deployments of chatbots are not the bar to compare with. There’s an incoming wave of extremely capable agents and process reimagining that is going to be highly disruptive. Been in this space over a decade and this time really is different. It’s hard for humans to perceive the exponential, it will be slow then sudden.

Lets go back to waterfall even harder and write the super correct and detailed design doc.

You jest but this is precisely what we have done. Our customers have downright rejected SCRUM. It is considered a waste of money.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#26

Post by jdalsgaard »

> Because the remaining 10% is what required most of the CS team’s time. They built an FAQ you can talk to.

These days it's hard to get people to read an email longer then 5 lines - yet people are super excited about abundant masses of text generated by LLMs. It does not compute....

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#28

Post by motbus3 »

fabian2k wrote: post #22

I think the argument here is a bit of a strawman, though there is a good point in there as well. AI will not automate all customer support, but it has the potential to automate a large fraction of it. The anecdote in there is about complex B2B enterprise software. That's not the majority of customer support, and is very heavy on escalating to actual experts. You don't have to remove 100% of the jobs to have huge effe…

Not putting names but a company I know closely had 20 engineers and now has only 4. And I feel like they plan for less

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#29

Post by jonathanstrange »

My biggest worry currently isn't even job-related, it's that corporations and authorities will use AI for customer/client relations but that this AI will not be allowed to make any significant changes and is therefore an utter waste of time. In many places, this could turn an already dire situation into an absolute nightmare. What might make it even worse is that authorities - and probably also corporations - will likely ban or block user AI agents, so you cannot even use your own AI to negotiate with their AI.

That's something that needs to be addressed by lawmakers ASAP. There needs to be a right to speak to a human, or (the perhaps overly tech optimistic route) a prohibition of AI that doesn't have adequate decision-making power.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#30

Post by skywhopper »

fabian2k wrote: post #22

I think the argument here is a bit of a strawman, though there is a good point in there as well. AI will not automate all customer support, but it has the potential to automate a large fraction of it. The anecdote in there is about complex B2B enterprise software. That's not the majority of customer support, and is very heavy on escalating to actual experts. You don't have to remove 100% of the jobs to have huge effe…

The article literally addresses this point. The easily automated stuff doesn’t save that much money. The big costs of support are the hard things you can’t automate.
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