This is good for society just like any productivity enhancing invention. You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation improving per-human output.
in practise: have you ever used any automated customer support for anything? it speaks for itself - it's literally worse than nothing.
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"
in practise: have you ever used any automated customer support for anything?
Do you prefer to talk to a human for things like this?
But I have tried to use it plenty of times.
People usually don't call the normal usable UI that solves problems "automated customer support", but if you refer to a navigable web site with real options to solving things, then well, you are offtopic but that one works.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Automated customer service works exceptionally well if it's done with care and doesn't involve AIs. But we simply do not have any AI design that helps with it. All designs we have only hinder it.
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.
Moving call centre jobs to India and Philippines 20 years ago didn't exactly make those that lost their jobs more productive over the long run. The textbook says it should have, as American comparative advantage should be in higher value-added activities.
The only problem is that the textbook also thinks re-skilling is free, everyone has alternate options for employment, and the labour market re-balances instantly.
If we were moving towards UBI and made employment an optional thing then a world in which machines do most of the human work would be utopic indeed
But reality has evolved differently, and after the need for manual labour and craftsmanship got decimated in the last century, now software is pushing into the fields where all the people needing jobs who aren't needed in production ended up.
If we follow this train of thought, that we'd like to diminish the need for individual labour, without removing the individuals need to work as well, we'll just be enlarging the divide between affluence and utter poverty.
Since 2013 this site has not been the optimistic hacker/startup forum Paul Graham envisioned in 2007. For a decade it has just been a higher quality version of r/technology but with the same reddit-tier doomposting.