I don't think there an ethical responsibility to worrying about your competitor's labor. That would lead to stagnation and it's own sort of ethical issues.
You misread. The poster is speaking about the ethical handling of customer service.
This comment is replying to the sentiment:
> Completely separate from the potential ethical issues and economic implications of putting 100k people out of a job, […]
I’m pretty sure. Although, the original comment was basically putting that issue aside, so I’m not sure what there is to say about it.
Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and a…
Ethical issues of putting people out of a job? Please. This mindset has to be called out because it directly causes suffering via creating a societal permission structure for politicians to protect interest groups with protectionist trade policy and internal pork barreling policy. Economic productivity putting people out of jobs is both good and necessary and it is unethical to work against it.
I think the commenter was definitely somewhat glib in their statement, but I don't think the case is as clear cut as you think.
The way I've come to think of the current moment in history is that capitalism allocates resources via markets and we use this system because in many situations its highly efficient. But governments allocate resources democratically exactly because we do not always want to allocate resources efficiently with respect to making money.
Whether it "makes sense" or not, most people believe there is more to life than the efficient allocation of resources and thus it might be a reasonable opinion that making 100,000 people suddenly unemployed is bad. I doubt seriously that the OP believes having 100,000 people working indefinitely when the labor can be done more efficiently by machines is good. I think most reasonable people want to see the transition handled more smoothly than a pure market capitalism would do it.
Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and a…
> that the only way to provide dispute resolution and customer service to 1B people with only 100 employees is by depriving them of any chance to interact with a human, and forcing all interaction with the company to go through AI. That, to me, is deeply disturbing, and very very difficult to justify. I don't know. Given the human beings I've interacted with in customer support, and the number of times I've had to es…
While I get the vibes, and have had experience of human customer support being very weird on a few occasions, replacing mediocre humans with mediocre AI isn't a win for customers getting actual solutions.
And right now, the LLMs aren't really that smart, they're making up for low intelligence by being superhumanly fast and able to hold a lot of context at once. While this is better than every response being from a randomly selected customer support agent (as I've experienced), and when they don't even bother reading their own previous replies when the randomiser puts the same person in the chain more than once, it's not great.
LLM customer support can seem like a customer win to start with, when the AI is friendlier etc., but either the AI is just being more polite about the fixed corporate policy, or the LLM is making stuff up when it talks to you.
Not responding about the article, but I remember interviewing with McKinsey as a graduating PhD. I had just passed their test and was going through the case study interview and I got paired with a PhD in physics from MIT. I think the study was something about cognac sales and I just got disgusted with the waste of training and talent, and after I got home from the airport that evening I pulled out of the interview process even though I had no other employment options at the time.
Somewhat ironically, over the past 20 years I’ve come to reject PhD-type career tracks after seeing how much PhD overproduction there is and how my older colleagues only had a BS or MS. These days, I yearn to leave my Big Tech job to start a “boring” business. Right now I’m taking Accounting 101 at a local university to understand business financials better.
Looking at the home page of Meanwhile only made me think of how life insurance is such a different thing than, say, a mortgage. With life insurance, counterparty risk matters. You don't care about your mortgage counterparty. I'm not going to buy life insurance from an insurer with Youtube videos of Anthony Pompliano on their home page. Know your enemy.
I don't care if you went to Ivy League and graduated at the top of your class, I really don't get WTF someone whose life experience has been almost exclusively in school really knows running about business. Get at least a few years work experience and call me. Or alternatively, start your own dang business if you are really that smart.
The whole business is nonsensical. The point of a consultant is they have a lot of experience in a specific domain, a recent Harvard grad is useless. From what I've heard, tons of their consultants are young people with minimal real industry experience
> The point of a consultant is they have a lot of experience in a specific domain
This is your mistake. The point of a consultant is to tell the business to do what the business was already planning to do anyway. This way the consultant takes the risk/blame of the decision. It's similar to the classic 'no one was ever fired for buying IBM' "I did what the McKinsey consultant told me" is CYA. The last piece is that since everyone is in on the game, when a decision leads to bad outcomes they don't blame the consultant, but something they could not have foreseen.
Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and a…
> dispute resolution, customer service, etc There's a huge assumption in your comment -- that having 100,000 employees necessarily guarantees (or even makes likely) that you will have some human to help you. More likely, those 100,000 humans are mostly working on sales and marketing, and the few allocated to support are all incentivized to avoid you, and to send you canned answers. A reasonably decent AI would be bet…
Here's a tip to every reader. If your founders or co-founders are not technical (and never have been) and are pitching stacks using buzzwords, run. Equity is worthless if the startup goes under
Non-technical folks (business/marketing/artistic/bullshit types) can be founders of tech companies, but there needs to be significant tech prescence at the top. I think as a general rule, at least a third of the equity needs to be devoted to technical folks if the company wants to succeed. Ideally you get someone whose good at both, or at least competent at one and really good in the other, such as Jobs or Gates.
The problem is non-technical folks tend to hire other non-technical folks for leadership (MBAs recruit other MBAs). What ends up happening is the leadership structure shifts from one dominated by technically-savvy people, to a culture of business. Best example is Apple (not a startup anymore, but I think my point will rest). Under Jobs, Forstall, Ive and other teams all prioritized product. Currently, Apple's leadership consists of Cook, Luca, Schiller, Eddy Cue, Williams, Ternus and Craig (they are the ones that effectively make the big decisions). Craig and Ternus are the only "engineers", and neither of them have been engineering first. This is not a founders story, but I am trying to highlight how non-technical folks will put in the decision making seat non-technical folks, which will harm your product in the long run. You can be the best engineer out there. If you report to someone who holds the reigns and is not technical, you are facing a tough road. Of course, there will be exceptions. However, this is rather the norm, and in startup culture, where the odds are already stacked against you, I'd advise against it.
I agree. And then I recall my last few interactions with insurance companies. Dealing with a machine is unlikely to be worse.
My knee-jerk reaction is to think that the prospect of an insurance company handing support over to machines is a terrible development. But it was already the case that they just arbitrarily do WTF ever they want, that outside a small set of actions that "bots" can perhaps handle fine they aren't going to do anything for you, and that the only way to get actual support for a real problem involves something being sent…
>the only way to get actual support for a real problem involves something being sent from a .gov email address or on frightening letterhead.
And then the they will add a low cost arbitration clause, where disputes are also handled by AI. Free market goes brrr