Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment.
Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable. I'm fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories, and I don't really miss the millions of extra products Amazon has.
I don’t think the answer is humans or algorithms, the answer is organizations incentivized to solve customer problems. Google doesn’t care about customers, if they did, they would fix this. Customers are locked in because where else will you go.
Just like Comcast doesn’t care because there’s only one cable company, Google doesn’t really have any AdWords or Adsense competition.
I think the solution is more competition so use ddg. Once customers have mobility, Google will work to retain them.
-Someone, somewhere in SV
It's harder to step on a landmine with Google, but Google's landmine is far more devastating.
We've already seen lots of news stories about algorithms shutting down people's Gmail accounts, developer accounts, YouTube channels, etc.
I personally went through 6 months of hell when my brother's Gmail account was locked due to "inauthentic behavior". He had become disabled and unable to log in, and when I logged in from my machine, Google's algorithm flagged it.
I went through an infuriating loop of trying to unlock it and hitting the same algorithm. There was no number to call. I would've paid $10,000 to get back into that account, which would've required 10 min with a customer support rep.
I tweeted at Google and they told me I had to log in to Twitter with his account in order to get help (obviously impossible for me). It was the most angry I have ever been at any company. It locked me out of important medical documents, family messages, social media -- everything.
I finally fixed it by asking a friend who was a marketing exec at Google to help. He said there's an internal form you can use for this situation -- only available to Google employees.
Other people have had similar experiences and had livelihoods destroyed.
Whatever you think about Comcast, they will never ignore you and let your entire digital life get locked away without any kind of recourse.
This is an enormous advantage.
I'm sure most people are generally happy to wait 2 days for something to arrive as well. Honestly, it almost feels like Amazon is trying to become an Alibaba and potentially look to take them on with the level of product quality that is now available there.
Half the results on any given product I search point straight back to Alibaba if I image search.
Sometimes I check if Aliexpress has it too, and if I'm not in a hurry I get it there for a huge savings.
They combination is what differentiates them
Soon, your appeal will be replied to by an AI, too. That way, most people will have the impression that they were reconsidered by a human and found in fault, which will likely make a large percentage of them give up. We're stonewalling real humans by building fake humans :(
And that means GPT could possibly reduce support costs for Amazon.
I don't think this is cynical. It's discussed openly. They want to provide the tools to enable all companies to automate customer service, which is where Facebook's big chatbot push came from.
And that's by design. They don't want to talk to you and help you. You're going to buy there anyway and we all know it.
If your human support team made a mistake, there was an appeal process. If your AI makes a mistake, sorry, bad robot, deal with it.
While people talk up Googles ai (at least they once did) the truth is while they may put out some good research now and again most of the stuff they deploy is crap by design - they can’t afford to spend a dollar per day per customer to run a complex algorithm on your data, they can only spend fractions of a penny.
This severely limits the quality of the ai deployed by large consumer oriented megacorps.
On the other hand you look at some of the ai being deployed in the b2b space or anywhere there is a real exchange of money and you’ll see some pretty expensive and interesting ai research and deployments.
For example, I currently have a company that I technically manage. It has one employee who does maintenance on the infrastructure (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), database (AWS RDS), and code for five different products. The only other people who touch the code are security auditors.
That just wasn't possible 10 years ago. Managing servers alone for those products (~50 EC2 instances, ~10 load balancers, 10 database instances) would've been a full-time job.
It was a non-trivial exercise, and to the best of my knowledge they still have some physical servers, but slowly but surely almost everything moved to Amazon.
Those physical server operations employees slowly left for other jobs.
They company kept growing and employing tech people though. Just tech people doing other things.
But the market is driving more and more money/resources to those companies/services.
Let alone Amazon/Youtube/Google are very different businesses, you can say Google has non-existent customer support, but at least for consumers, so far my experience with Amazon is more positive than negative.
I don't dispute that. But a lot of other people have issues with dropshippers, fake products, radioactive products[1], unreliable reviews, etc.
When I stopped using Amazon, I realized I was returning ~90% of all my purchases just because the product was fake, described wrong, low quality, or just not durable enough to last even a month.
Yes, it's great to be able to return things, but it's a lot nicer to feel reasonably confident that the person who sold a product to me actually believes it's a good fit for what I want as a consumer.
1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/09/20/business/nuclea...
On both of those sites, you can change the filter to show only products that are available in stores.
Those in-store products still have whatever guarantees they did 20 years ago (selected by a human working for Target, probably going to be pulled off shelves if they result in too many returns).
Algorithms are human judgement.
In a strict code sense an algorithm is a way of encoding a set of assumptions that you decide on when you're developing the code to run it. Even in unsupervised machine learning an algorithm is the result of human judgement because someone decided to delegate the decision making process to a machine.
Every time a computer makes a judgement call there is a human who is responsible, and should be accountable, for that process existing.
To pull it back a bit, "human judgment" in my usage meant "input processed by human using a brain" and algorithm meant "input processed by machine".
Given those premises, the argument that "algorithms are human judgment" is untrue both by definition and by observation.
For example, when I ask Google/Siri/Alexa a question like, "What is the best way to set up my router?", I will get a wildly different answer than if I ask a GeekSquad employee.
They may be great for 80% or even 99.9%, but they cannot be 100%.
People use them because they are cheap and convenient though. It's the same with algorithms. If you charge margins high enough for good customer service you will get out-competed by those that don't on price.
> Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable. I'm fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories
Not only are they viable, they are hugely more profitable without the human expenses. This inhuman model - yes, I think that is exactly what it is - will displace everything else that simply can't compete in runaway capitalism.
Of course, that's not what we've got...
Given that's possible with human moderation too (cf tax codes), what makes you think AGI will solve the problem?
I don't believe this. The reputation loss alone will cost you a lot of potential money. Stadia is basically dead because the Google brand is completely untrustworthy. B2B customers want to avoid Google as much as possible because it's just a liability that threatens to ruin their business.
I don't expect Amazon to go anywhere, even if people's impression of drops.
The reason it isn’t sufficient to be human-level is because individual humans have all kinds of biases and blindspots which scammers design their scams around.
I’m kinda thinking it may be a necessary prerequisite, as scams could involve anything a human wants, but it isn’t enough.
I agree with you, but what I meant by "viable" was more from a consumer perspective.
> This inhuman model - yes, I think that is exactly what it is - will displace everything else that simply can't compete in runaway capitalism.
While I think you're mostly right, Amazon is eventually going to burn enough buyers that they go back to the more trustworthy brick-and-mortar stores.
Most people I personally know have already done this. They may search for something on Amazon, but they will go and buy it somewhere else.
I'm obviously part of a very specific subset, but it's going to hurt Amazon eventually, especially if the US takes a more consumer-friendly regulatory approach than it has for the past few years (which it will).