Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.

I worked in Europe where it was not acceptable to address the customer in broken English. Easily $15 an hour. But what you are paid is not what it costs the business, (desk, training, IT support, part of a manager, etc), that can easily be double what they are paid. For anything outside the script someone with supervisor access and the authority to make high level decisions needs to get involved, those people cost even more. Some customers call several times for a complex question. $30 was just the average for complex queries.

> Customer service might have access to more information not in the public, might have access to other instances of the same problem where they had to find out how to interpret the rules and disambiguate, and most importantly, they usually have the power to take action

Most of these instances are much cheaper to solve by fixing the UI to allow the customer to do it themselves, if it isn't then it's usually cheaper to lose the customer. And you do not want to make something like "refunds" too easy.

> leaving your customer dissatisfied is not profitable

I'm sorry to say it, but dissatisfying customers that are expensive to service is often exactly what you need to do to maximise profits, as long as you manage to avoid damage to your brand. It's even better to encourage those customers to go to your competitor. What may "feel right" to you, is not what "feels right" to an MBA. Engineers tend to underestimate that.

Hopefully the costumers will rewards companies with better customer service.

A good company will provide a good chat bot that will make it immediately clear when it can help and when it can't, with a clear and simple way to contact a human if needed.

There really should be a website that documents factually interactions with these companies that lawyers can dissect.

Dealing with a human whose job is to function as a bot is worse than just dealing with a bot.

More recently, I was lied to repeatedly by agents who told me that they were going to do something, or had done something already. I had to contact support many times, and the issue was only fixed after I was able to escalate to the executive support team, who confirmed I had been lied to repeatedly, and who were able to fix the problem.

Example: "In JS, create a Promise that is resolved with some emitted value from an EventEmitter, or rejected if an 'error' event is emitted first. Write that concisely, using '.once' and only removing the other event respectively."

Fairly everyday thing in node. Every competent programmer would grasp the intent here pretty quick and write correct code, but somehow it's generally beyond ChatGPT.

Example ChatGPT output (comments mine):

    function eventToPromise(emitter, event) {
      return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        emitter.once('error', reject); // memory leak: not removing the other listener
        emitter.once(event, (data) => {
          emitter.removeListener('error', reject);
          resolve(data);
        });
      });
    }

   function promiseFromEvent(emitter, eventName) {
     return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
       const resolveHandler = (data) => {
         emitter.removeListener(eventName, errorHandler); // memory leak: should be removeListener('error', errorHandler)
         resolve(data);
       };

       const errorHandler = (error) => {
         emitter.removeListener(eventName, resolveHandler);
         reject(error);
       };

       emitter.once(eventName, resolveHandler);
       emitter.once('error', errorHandler);
     });
   }

ChatGPT: "Apologies for the oversight. You are right; there is a bug in the previous code. The issue is that if the 'error' event is emitted first, both the 'error' and 'data' event listeners should be removed, and the Promise should be rejected."

Nope. The error event listener is actually the only listener working correctly... It proceeds to introduce a cleanup function that removes both listeners (despite keeping '.once'), fixing the bug by accident, not intent. Asking it to change it so that the code adheres to the original prompts starts a downward spiral.

Is that such a bad thing?

FWIW it used to be that you could pick up the phone, dial '0', and talk to an operator, a real human being with significant power over the system they operated.

When the phone companies got rid of human operators: that was the beginning of the end of ...something?

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

Other stores where had more than 3 or 4 human manned lanes, now have just 1 most of the time.

Also, btw: it isn't so bad to do self-checkout of large items as they have a wireless handheld barcode scanner at each self-checkout stand; it isn't like you are having to lift each item and place it on the platform. There is something similar now at Target, and I routinely self-checkout large/heavy furnishings.

Huh. Everything at my grocery store either has a barcode or is produce that needs to be weighed, so there's no speed advantage for a cashier.

And they've gone through different sizes of self-checkout, some of which actually had more room than the cashier checkouts.

I hope you're right but this hasn't been the case at the grocery stores around me. QFC (a Kroger-owned brand in the Pacific Northwest) has, at least at two I usually frequent, stopped staffing checklanes after 8 or 9pm. It's self-checkout only. These are at stores that have a lot of signage advertising that "summer hours are here, all locations open until 1am!"

I normally shop around 9 or 10pm and there has historically been at least a "push this button to ask someone to come to the in-person method". Much as I like self-checkout, I don't like doing it with a full cart of groceries. Both recent times, I was told rather bluntly that a full cart was my problem.

With service like that, I'd rather just go to the Amazon spyware grocery store. At least I can put everything in a bag myself and they're open until 11pm.

I shop for myself, spouse and 4 adolescent/teenage children. I can typically ring myself out faster and more orderly than the cashier.

Most cashiers are super wasteful with bags and just pack things illogically. These aren't the trained baggers of yester-year afterall.

Either way, my favorite way to shop at my local wholesale warehouse has been the app which lets you ring up as you load up the cart, pay and simply walk out the door.

Cashiers are not in fact still necessary, the self-checkout lanes are merely a stop-gap yo better automation.

Publix has always been more expensive, but gave you great people experience, a cashier, and usually a bag boy asking if you wanted help out to the car.

Now that they're moving to self checkout, what the hell are we paying more for?

I don't think anyone buys (pun intended) the argument of self-checkout being there to enable lower prices for consumers.

And she didn't notice and walked out.

I came back a few days later and it took me nearly half an hour to explain that I wanted to pay for something without buying it. Finally a manager figured it out heh.

Look up next time you use your credit card :|

Then it appears on the balance sheet as a negative.

There is a restaurant in Austin, El Arroyo, that's famous for their funny signs. In the midst of the pandemic they had a sign that said "Once this pandemic is over and we start seeing people in person again, we're all going to be awkward as fuck." It's a general sentiment that I agree with - the more we get used to "virtual" interactions, the less comfortable we are with synchronous, person-to-person interactions.

If the majority of support people are "minimally trained, low wage employees who barely know how to use a computer just reading a script." then how exactly is the AI going to be better by using the recorded interactions of "low wage employees who barely know how to use a computer just reading a script"

1) I know there's a chance I'll need customer service with that thing 2) The company I'm buying from has actually good customer service.

But I have tried to use it plenty of times.

I think there’s a lot of ways for it to be handled.

Broadening access to AI will massively benefit all humans

I don’t see how that provides any employment.

Would anyone whose been keeping up with LLM progress be surprised if within the next 3 years all AI powered call centers are significantly more useful than all of the current call centers?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0

Median household income has doubled since only 1994.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/200838/median-household-...

Mode and median were raised even faster than the average. Humanity managed to uplift a huge fraction of people out of extreme poverty.

In 1820s around 70-80% people lived in extreme poverty

In 1920s it was around 60-70%

In 2020s it's around 10%

source: e.g. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e20f2f1a-en/index.html?i...

That's my anecdotal evidence.

The parent complained about having to work more when the tools get more efficient, insinuating that the fruits of advancement go only to the business owner. I commented only on that.

However we have been too slow to reduce the CO2 emissions that are causing climate change exactly because it doesn't have an immediate local toxic effect.

Now, it could just be that people who accumulate power also accumulate the means to defend that power, and that to accumulate it in the first place you've almost got to be a sociopath, but that's actually being thoughtful instead of bringing up context-barren boogeymen.

If the only thing standing between poor countries and a world of cheap AI abundance is law, respect for those laws won't last. Why should e.g. India play by the normal rules of trade if foreign companies have developed do-everything robots that they want to license on a restrictive basis? India can obtain a few do-everything robots by means of normal trade, jailbreak or reverse engineer them, then duplicate do-everything robots domestically while ignoring the impotent griping of the original company and its government. There's no big IP lobby inside of India itself and it's really hard to see what "carrot" other countries could offer for compliance that tops the prize of having unlimited do-everything robots.

You understand that the course of the Industrial Revolution was a huge increase in barbarism, correct? People forced off their lands, children into factories, labor conditions that were horrendous across the board. Violent labor upheavals, WWI, a communist revolution, the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, WWII and the first use of nuclear weapons. Only in the wake of all of that was there anything like the widespread improvement of people’s lives and in places like the US, this still required a tumultuous and again violent dismantling of segregation.

I certainly don’t hope the AI evolution follows the example of its industrial counterpart, or we’re in for a quite wild ride.

How will it do that? So far the only things being automated are Q&A and image generation.

I presume, you imagine large parts of the population will be happy working in the sex industry or similar?

People's irrational assumption, the past could always be linearly extrapolated into the future is remarkably out of place when it comes to the epitome of non-linearity, intelligent consciousness.

Maybe you're right. But consider the possibility that you are wrong and what the various bad outcomes could be and maybe then you'll at least make some kind of qualification to that statement.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrospective_determinism

Also note that the industrial revolution was a turning point and not necessarily a good one for everybody that was alive back then, and that there are plenty of bad effects from it into today.

The technological breakthroughs were great and we reap their benefits everyday. But, there was a lot more than simple technological revolution to get to the point where the majority of the population were no longer subject to immiseration at the behest of profit. There were a lot of hard legal and political arguments that had to end up on the side of labour to also give us the life of relative leisure we have now.

Working conditions were for quite a long time absolutely horrendous. Child labour went from helping your parents on the farm to working in dangerous factories for 12 hour shifts.

Massive amounts of pollution, which we are seeing the effects of today, and that doesn't only include CO2 emissions.

Ideally, AI would help humanity work less or achieve more with less effort, but we both know that's not how corporations function. When there is more profit to be made, or money to be saved, they will.

AI will cost people jobs. Funnily enough, its trade jobs that are probably the safest from all these changes.

1. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691121354/

Says who? What jobs did the industrial revolution eliminate? Essentially just spinners and weavers, and that caused a violent social uprising by the Luddites.

Textiles were far outweighed by the industrialization of steam power, ironworking, and machine tools. Those three things did not put people out of jobs, they just created huge numbers of new jobs and totally altered society.

I don't think anybody really believes AI will directly create new jobs, in any way comparable to steam or steel. They think it will be like textiles, but everywhere and without the balancing impact of those massive, unrelated new industries.

Be it animal, human, or machine. In every case where something made a better slave, capital has switched to using it.

Recognize what class you're in and see it for what it is (lotta people identify with the ruling class on this site), but don't pretend for a second us tech workers are somehow insulated from being workers. No one will care when we're homeless on the street anymore than the current group of i-got-mines care about the current homeless.

We're living more comfortamble lives and with more trinkets. More stressful, more depressed, more isolated, more damaging to the environment, more casually controlled and supervised, even downright less able to reproduce in the more modern of societies (the total gift of death)...

And especially in the first centuries of the industrial revolution peoples lives got a huge turn for the worse, pushed into cities and factories, working up to 16 hour shifts, little kids working just the same in body breaking conditions, discarded as useless when they had an accident, and so on. And it's not some change they welcomed either. They were pushed into it, by the rich classes destroying their previous livelihood, by legal changes making it impossible to survive, and even by raw police and millitary force. And they resisted tooth and nail to keep their previous way of life.

Yeah, and that's when people make it clear they don't know history.

There were many points during the Industrial Revolution when if you said the same thing, you would be absolutely correct.

A few of those times, the problem was "solved" by violence and deep restructure of the economy; other times it was "solved" by violence and letting lots and lots of people die. By the 20th century people realized that if you restructure the economy earlier, you can avoid that violence step, but some also realized they can just spread propaganda saying problems never happen, and stop any reorganization.

Countries with strong social institutions like Norway do an amazing job of distributing the gains from finding oil.

Countries with poor social institutions (basically all of the developing world) end up enriching a small minority with the oil money. Even Canada doesn’t do a very good job of improving the lives of its citizens with its oil money.

Given the way the Western world has been going in terms of wealth consolidation, I am not optimistic about broad segments of the population seeing the benefits of AI.

If AI is going to automate away all 'meaningless' low and middle class jobs then the government should be stepping in to tax the productivity gains and use the money to educate and employ those people in roles that AI can't (maybe ever) fill. Having the government pay tens of millions of people to further scientific research and innovation would be a massive boon for our society rather than the current ratcheting incrementalism and lack of innovation the pervades in our current system where innovation is always shunned unless it can provide immediate short-term gains.

Unfortunately it's moot to even think about. Nothing will change and the elites will simply let the majority of the population starve to death.

The oligarchy doesn't want to fund this future, and the federal, state and local governments in the US don't have the wherewithal.

1. “Admiralty and maritime law is a couple thousand lawyers fighting over a few dozen ships.”

2. “Beatings will continue until morale improves.”

It’s an older meme, sir, but it checks out.

Not far from now even intellectual jobs will be a.i.

post scarcity star Trek civilization is very possible if we stop letting greed control us.

disclaimer : I run an ai automation agency, and support the fight against poverty and for universal healthcare and stuff, but the faster we automate the faster the govt is forced to roll out solutions to fix the problems automation creates.

Milk men, computers (the people kind), horse carriage chauffeurs, people who light lamp posts (when they were oil based) we could go on here.

You are clearly coming from empathic place, but I am not sure your premise is nuanced enough. Lots of progress has "victims" but that doesn't necessarily make progress had.

I used to work in the industry and my experience had been that companies who don't care about customer service will have shitty customer service, bots or not. The opposite is true as well.

I have seen simple request bounce between up to 15 customer service reps without the end user getting what they wanted. On the contrary I think some of the best customer service is when there is no need for customer service at all.

Would definitely depend what you're phoning in for, though. Going through some common process, digging up information, or needing a special exception to be made?

Don't see why those can't be automated.

Eventually I don't see why an AI shouldn't process refunds. Its an infinitely measurable process and you always know the risk involved (the amount). So it's trivial to decide if you think the AI should handle it or send it off to a human for approval. I would not be surprised if there were already companies experimenting with stuff like this. Widespread adoption will probably take time.

Imagine for a second, that there is actually a LLM agent that can not only understand what you want but actually do things too. Like, why not have these systems reset passwords, check on the status of a refund, update a mailing address, change billing info, cancel your account, email me some documents, etc. This frees up people to actually work on more important things. The hardest part of all this pre-ChatGPT was understanding fully what the person wanted. That's petty much solved now.

I think we're headed to a future where you'll actually want an LLM agent vs a human in that they will know everything and can solve your issue in seconds. It's like when you win the lottery and get the support person who's been at the company 15 years and knows everything in and out. That's what these LLM's can be.

Massive upside for some things, neutral for other things. That's net positive.

I've found social media a mix. There are people who seem really interested in making stuff happen and there are people who are surprised you expect anything more than sympathetic cooing noises.