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AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

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Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#91

Post by nurumaik »

hereme888 wrote: post #63

AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees. It also improves brand reputation by actually paying attention to what customers are saying and responding in a timely manner, with expert-level knowledge, unlike typical customer service reps. I've used LLMs to help me fix Windows issues using pretty advanced methods, that MS employees would have just told me to either re-install Windows or send th…

I don't want AI customer support. I want open documentation so I can ask AI if I want or ask human support if it's not resolvable with available documentation

All my interactions with any AI support so far is repeatedly saying "call human" until it calls human

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#92

Post by ToucanLoucan »

grues-dinner wrote: post #36
candiddevmike wrote: post #12

> Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. Oof

These are probably the same people who are "surprised" when 100 offshore agency dredgings don't magically do the app 10x faster than 10 expensive onshore workers. To be fair, the PowerPoint they were shown at that AI Synergies retreat probably was very slick.

It's almost like the people in charge of these businesses have no goddamn clue what they're actually selling, how it works or why it's good (or isn't).

It's almost like, and stay with me here, but it's almost like the vast majority of tech companies are now run by business graduates who do not understand tech AT ALL, have never written a single line of code in their lives, and only know how to optimize businesses by cutting costs and making the products worse until users revolt.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#93

Post by cicko »

alecco wrote: post #76
xenotux wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO this is going to be part of a broader trend where advancements in AI and robotics nullify any comparative advantages low wage countries had. Then why hasn't it yet? In fact, some lower-wage countries such as China are on the forefront of industrial automation? I think the bottom line is that many Western countries went out of their way to make manufacturing - automated or not - very expensive and time-consumin…

> Then why hasn't it yet? Because the current companies are behind the curve. Most of finance still runs on Excel. A lot of other things, too. AI doesn't add much to that. But the new wave of Tech-first companies now have the upper hand since the massive headcount is no longer such an advantage. This is why Big Tech is doing layoffs. They are scared. But the traditional companies would need to redo the whole business…

>They end up losing knowledgeable people who could've turned the ship around, the remaining employees become apathetic/lazy, and brand loyalty sinks to the bottom

Right. And AI is here to fix that!

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#94

Post by inquirerGeneral »

nurumaik wrote: post #91
hereme888 wrote: post #63

AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees. It also improves brand reputation by actually paying attention to what customers are saying and responding in a timely manner, with expert-level knowledge, unlike typical customer service reps. I've used LLMs to help me fix Windows issues using pretty advanced methods, that MS employees would have just told me to either re-install Windows or send th…

I don't want AI customer support. I want open documentation so I can ask AI if I want or ask human support if it's not resolvable with available documentation All my interactions with any AI support so far is repeatedly saying "call human" until it calls human

[dead]

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#95

Post by PhantomHour »

crazygringo wrote: post #41
candiddevmike wrote: post #12

> Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. Oof

This is no different from the personal computer, and it is to be expected. The initial years of adopting new tech have no net return because it's investment . The money saved is offset by the cost of setting up the new tech. But then once the processes all get integrated and the cost of buying and building all the tech gets paid off, it turns into profit. Also, some companies adopt new tech better than others. Some d…

> This is no different from the personal computer, and it is to be expected.

What are you talking about? The return on investment from computers was immediate and extremely identifiable. For crying out loud "computers" are literally named after the people whose work they automated.

With Personal Computers the pitch is similarly immediate. It's trivial to point at what labour VisiCalc automated & improved. The gains are easy to measure and for every individual feature you can explain what it's useful for.

You can see where this falls apart in the Dotcom Bubble. There are very clear pitches; "Catalogue store but over the internet instead of a phone" has immediately identifiable improvements (Not needing to ship out catalogues, being able to update it quickly, not needing humans to answer the phones)

But the hype and failed infrastructure buildout? Sure, Cisco could give you an answer if you asked them what all the internet buildout was good for. Not a concrete one with specific revenue streams attached, and we all know how that ends.

The difference between Pets.com and Amazon is almost laughably poignant here. Both ultimately attempts to make the "catalogue store but on the computer" work, but Amazon focussed on broad inventory and UX. They had losses, but managed to contain them and became profitable quickly (Q4 2001). Amazon's losses shrank as revenue grew.

Pets.com's selling point was selling you stuff below cost. Good for growth, certainly, but this also means that their losses grew with their growth. The pitch is clearly and inherently flawed. "How are you going to turn profitable?" We'll shift into selling less expensive goods "How are you going to do that?" Uhhh.....

...

The observant will note: This is the exact same operating model of the large AI companies. ChatGPT is sold below unit cost. Claude is sold below unit cost. Copilot is sold below unit cost.

What's the business pitch here? Even OpenAI struggles to explain what ChatGPT is actually useful for. Code assistants are the big concrete pitch and even those crack at the edges as research after research shows the benefits appear to be psychosomatic. Even if Moore's law hangs on long enough to bring inference cost down (nevermind per-task token usage skyrocketing so even that appears moot), what's the pitch. Who's going to pay for this?

Who's going to pay for a Personal Computer? Your accountant.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#96

Post by daymanstep »

signatoremo wrote: post #88
daymanstep wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has more robots per capita than the US And the idea that China has low wages is outdated. Companies like Apple don't use China for its low wages, countries like Vietnam have lower wages. China's strength lies in its manufacturing expertise

Manufacturing expertise that have been transferred from the West over the last 40 years. Knowledge and expertise are fluid, they can go both way, they can be transferred to other countries as well, India, Vietnam, etc. The world doesn’t stand still.

I don't get why I was downvoted. I didn't say anything that contradicts what you just said.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#97

Post by keybored »

jmyeet wrote: post #31

AI is going to force the issue of having to deal with the inequity in our economic system. And my belief is that this confrontation will be violent and many people are going to die. The fundamental issue is wealth inequality. The ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are war and revolution. I personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is…

Whether or not you are correct about the concrete details here, it is laughable for regular people[1] to bicker about whose job will be replaced first when the people who profit from that are just sitting on their ass, ready to get labor for nothing instead of relatively little.

[1] Although I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people who argue about this topic online are already independently wealthy

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#98

Post by scarface_74 »

ido wrote: post #75
torginus wrote: post #70

I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue. At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed vendor tools we were dissatisfied with, to an in-house solution. I'm sure the company we were ordering from misses the revenue. The SaaS industry is full of products whose value proposition is 'it's cheaper to buy the product from us than hire a guy who handles…

Historically imporvments in programmer productivity (e.g. via better languages, tooling and hardware) didn't correlate to a decrease in demand for programemrs, but quite the opposite.

This is completely different - said as someone who has been in the industry professionally for 30 years and as a hobbyist before then for a decade.

There are projects I lead now that I would have at least needed one or maybe two junior devs to do the grunt work after I have very carefully specified requirements (which I would have to do anyway) and diagrams and now ChatGPT can do the work for me.

That’s never been the case before and I’ve personally gone from programming in assembly, to C, to higher level languages and on the hardware side, personally managing the build out of a data center that had an entire room dedicated to a SAN with a whopping 3TB of storage to being able to do the same with a yaml/HCL file.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#99

Post by mava_app »

pluc wrote: post #78
hereme888 wrote: post #63

AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees. It also improves brand reputation by actually paying attention to what customers are saying and responding in a timely manner, with expert-level knowledge, unlike typical customer service reps. I've used LLMs to help me fix Windows issues using pretty advanced methods, that MS employees would have just told me to either re-install Windows or send th…

Except AI support agents are only using content that is already available in support knowledge bases, making the entire exercise futile and redundant. But sure, they're eloquent while wasting your time.

There are AI agents that train from knowledge bases but also keep improving on actual conversations. For example, our Mava bot actually learns from mods directly within Discord servers. So it's not about replacing human mods but assist them so they can take better care of users in the end.

Re: AI is predominantly replacing outsourced, offshore workers

#100

Post by daymanstep »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #64
daymanstep wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has more robots per capita than the US And the idea that China has low wages is outdated. Companies like Apple don't use China for its low wages, countries like Vietnam have lower wages. China's strength lies in its manufacturing expertise

Western engineers worked relentlessly on knowledge transfer to China to do so, it might be easy to bring back with the 10x industrial subsidies that the CCP provided to do so.

And the US is already starting to do it, for example partnering with South Korea or Japan to rebuild American shipbuilding.
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