401–410 of 563 posts
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 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.
I'm assuming that you're looking at it from the point of view of someone who only contacts tech support when human intervention is actually required. And honestly, probably 90% of people are like this. In terms of who actually takes up the majority of the support reps' time, however, is the 10% of people who are bored, lonely, genuinely mentally handicapped, whingers, and people who get really angry about some bizarr…
I think you’re overestimating the average person.
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.
If we were moving towards UBI and made employment an optional thing then a world in which machines do most of the human work would be utopic indeed
But reality has evolved differently, and after the need for manual labour and craftsmanship got decimated in the last century, now software is pushing into the fields where all the people needing jobs who aren't needed in production ended up.
If we follow this train of thought, that we'd like to diminish the need for individual labour, without removing the individuals need to work as well, we'll just be enlarging the divide between affluence and utter poverty.
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> 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…
Communication preference is one thing. But what a lot of modern "online" support is really about is preventing people from getting support and forcing them into a dark pattern doing what the company wants and not what they want. If I could unsubscribe, deal with billing errors, resolve complaints, etc online I'd love it. But most support systems try and trap you in some Kafkaesque faq hell that never lets you get nea…
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.
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FYI, I am actively avoiding any service that makes it hard for me to talk to a human. I don’t think I am the only one.
Unless you're wealthy enough to delegate it to an assistant, I'm sure that's really hard for anything that doesn't involve going to a local store or service. (Or, again, personal advisors of various types but again we're talking lots of money involved.) ADDED: And the fact that going through online travel/hotel/airline sites is mostly easier (and cheaper) than dealing with most travel agents used to be. Until somethi…
Funny. I wouldn't call myself wealthy but considered doing this a couple days ago. This washing machine thing charged my card then didn't give me working credits
I knew at that point I'd end up spending several hours dealing with customer support hell and possibly calling up the CC company to bounce the charge. At some point I'll probably get an assistant just because I really don't have time for this shit anymore
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Actually, economists are now saying that the 20th century was an anomaly in terms of QoL and we're reverting back to U shaped distribution of wealth. It will be very interesting times when all that 20th century earned Baby Boomer wealth moves to the next generation and accelerates the shift even faster.
Do you mean U-shaped on a wealth vs. age graph, or something else? I would imagine wealth distribution to look more like an exponential distribution.
Will the distribution be more even or more uneven?
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I boycott the self checkout, and always go through the cashier, even if that means waiting a bit longer. The way I look at it that's at least a token towards keeping people employed that make substantially less money than I do and even if my time is valuable it isn't nearly as valuable to me as their employment is to them. I hoped more people would join me this but it looks like it is a losing battle.
You're fighting the wrong battle. The real galaxy brain move is to use a self-checkout and fuck up horribly so they have to send the staffer over anyway, and take ten times as long. Then it appears on the balance sheet as a negative.
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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.
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.
>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…
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.
But then wouldn't you get double dipped on taxes?