What do you mean by “work problems”. Writing regex? SQL? Exclusively software development?

Outside of this, even using for “summarizing” documents, you are lucky if it doesn’t distort or twist meanings such that it isn’t useful, except now you have spent as much or more time checking it’s work than just doing it yourself. Checking others’ work is much harder than writing it.

Every time I’ve attempted to ask it something I can’t answer myself or through immediate googling it has been completely useless.

I’m unconvinced that it isn’t just developers with a poor eye for nuance who aren’t realising how much information they are giving in the questions who rave about it. Horses can count, if you give enough context.

It seems to be generally good at novelty style transfers.

> 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.

This is pure fantasy, extrapolating what you want to see into an arbitrary future where it’s true. More likely it gaslights the customer onto thinking problems are their fault until they give up, but this scenario is mildly cheaper for the companies who don’t need to pay humans to do the runaround.

This is a shallow reading of what a “bot” could be capable of. Whoever is running customer service at that company has obviously decided that for certain situations people should be entitled to courtesy replacements. That decision was not contingent on who is taking the calls. When that person makes the decision to shift some/all workload to chatbots, he, or she could easily teach the bots what types of courtesy repairs or replacements should be considered, and the criteria they should meet.

For instance, in your case, the rep probably knew that the part cost a couple bucks and the postage cost a buck or two, so a three dollar expense was deemed well worth it for goodwill.

This is the kind of thing that a bot would be just as good at, and it’s also a thing that does not automatically happen just because the agents are humans. Some companies would fire the human rep for giving you that freebie.

Honestly, the real reason why bots will be a good thing is that 3/4 of customer service calls come from confused people who really just need handholding. Setting the jobs issue aside, which is going to be a much bigger question across humanity, eventually I’d like to see bots handle that 3/4 of calls. Half the customer service staff could be retained and deployed exclusively to handle the issues actually worth their time.

Almost every encounter I've had with "human" tech support in the last 5 years or so has been: 1. Me asking a question, 2. Support entering it into a computer, 3. Computer does something, 4. Support tells me what computer says. They aren't empowered to go off their scripts, exercise human judgment or to solve problems. Sadly, this work might as well be an AI chat bot at this point.

In a just world, the profits and cost savings captured by AI and automation would go to the displaced workers rather than the owners and customers, but that's politically impossible at least in the USA.

Relying on individual developer's ethics is not going to work. "There's always someone willing to write the kill-bot software." I've in the past objected to (and refused to) develop ethically questionable software. It doesn't make a difference, because Bill, two desks down, is happy to write whatever software boss tells him to write.

There will be a war, not UBI. UBI the way AI safety guys want it is never ever happening.

So this comes up all the time on these threads.

The key bit of information I’m missing is where did those milk men, carriage chauffeurs, lamp lighters, whatever go and how did they get there after they were rendered useless .

Did they retrain for new careers? If so how did they afford the education/retraining necessary. How did they pay their rent/mortgage/etc. in the time in between it took them to do that? What are the new jobs that are going to be created after sweeping automation in service and knowledge industries?

I can think of a few jobs that probably won’t see automation anytime soon, but a lot of them are crap, or would result in a major quality of life degradation. I remember years before ChatGPT reading a lot of speculation on automation and what potential careers could survive in the face of some AI or robotics revolution and the jobs people considered safe from automation were things like caregiver. Just a quick google search shows the pay range for that job near starting at minimum wage.

Genuine question, I really don’t know. Personally I’d love to leave the software industry, but I don’t have any realistic alternative. Rent keeps getting more expensive, never less and the jobs that pay enough to keep up require expensive credentials that don’t only require a lot of money, but a lot of time as well.

I probably should read up on the history of this sort of stuff, but I take a look at places like the rust belt and it seems like the next career for a lot of the people in blue collar work that was moved or automated was “opioid addict”. Personally if I lose everything and am forced out on the street because I’m obsolete, I don’t give a flying shit what kind of new jobs there are, because they’ll be inaccessible to me.

Speak for yourself.