I don't understand why everyone (excluding people who were replaced) is so "outraged".
Americans were replaced with off-shore call centers last decade. Now they're replaced with AI. Both are equally shitty because there's a very real human cost here. I certainly don't feel good about building technology that puts anyone out of a job like that. Maybe that person was working there as a means to pay for school to get a better job, and now has to find other work.
Meanwhile, the leadership of Shopify gets to horde more wealth making it also feel pretty greedy to me.
So I can see how, at least some significant share of people, would be "outraged" by that.
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?
I worked at Shopify when it was much smaller, it was fairly common for support staff to reach out with questions for the product team which drive fixing bugs or improving features.
How can the AI chatbot fill that role? It’s a gap that offshoring/disintegrating support creates.
It will answer questions that customers have and then it will feedback to the product team about the most common queries made by customers.
Honestly, the Hacker News crowd have been such visionaries about the potential for technology but as soon as that technology infringes upon their livelihood they develop these massive blind spots.
Customer support execs in most companies at least either have documentation or enough experience to understand where the customer is heading with the discussion and resolve problems quicker. Most customers especially larger ones would have account executives who are aware of the customer's needs and personalities and how to deal with them/help them.
I do not think an AI chatbot can replace that, at least as of now. And for those, quoting `it will get better in x years`, do note that those entities who have resources to fund such researches and improve things are slowly evolving from research first to profit first, which means we might not get the AI future we want, but what they want.
This gives me the sense there's a nice training set, and a fairly clear way to measure the AI's performance. "It will get better in X years" sounds very likely
TIL the HN crows works in customer support/call centers!
Unless we somehow reform the whole society into a socioeconomic utopia in the next decade or so, what started happening now with AI has all the potential to speed up the wealth gap growth and push everyone else towards the gutter.
I think once you've applied the label "outrage" it's very difficult to see what people's concerns are and why. It adds this moral component, where only some people are entitled to be outraged (eg the people you identified as having understandable reasons) and thus by implication everyone else is throwing an unnecessary tantrum. I think that actually obscures what's going on.
I think it's worth resisting applying the label of "outrage," and it becomes easier after that to hear people's concerns and evaluate their merits. Because they don't have to reach the artificial goalpost to justify outrage, they just have to be valid concerns.
I don't think experience with pre-LLM chatbots is relevant here.
Outrage now that it's coming after their jobs just rings hollow.
Just because you can't understand why this affects your future doesn't mean it's hollow outrage.
Broadening access to AI will massively benefit all humans
all employment, music, art, ...
Just straight up not a fact.
You can't be so blind to history that you truly believe this, our present day is filled with examples of this not being true. You can directly look at literally any medical achievement that corporations own.
7-10 years ago people on this forum thought they were invincible. People who said said software work would be commoditized were ridiculed.
Rate of change is just fast and probably lots of people just thought that a career in tech was a free golden ticket for life. Now that it is threatened people are getting anxious and defensive.
The vast majority of bad things happening in the world are okay as long as they don't happen to "me". Living conditions in sub Saharan Africa are really poor, but noone cares. We are all hypocrites to some degree.
Then they said #learntocode when the robots came for the cashier and bank teller, for I am a programmer and my job is safe
Now that the robot is learning to code it seem they no longer desire progress
Given the state of A.I. even today, which is not that advanced, we need one terabyte per day or per week for training purposes. Someone has to produce that data and combine human made data with machine generated data. Synthetic data like that will be fed into ML algorithms.
That simple process, in my calculations, will be the biggest industry on the planet by 2030. The data has to grow 1000x every three years or so. So this industry will end unemployment worldwide, for every person on the planet and also all ages.
I don’t see how that provides any employment.
But data is the foundation of everything in their function. The transformation of data -> information is always done by humans. Given better and better statistical algorithms, that gap will become smaller and smaller, but automation will never be able to produce information by itself.
Other serious applications include medicine and doctors. How about building houses out of epoxy and graphene walls, weighing 10 kg every house and stacking 10000 houses on top of one another? I.e. skyscrapers the size of Everest? Don't we need some serious data and A.I. architecture for the construction to stand tall?
It’s a disingenuous question to stroke the ego of the GP and deride those “outraged”. Either that or GP is just dumb. If they were truly interested in why people are outraged, they simply could have read the numerous comments before theirs (regardless of whether they agree the concerns in those comments are valid or not, it would answer the stated question)