A call center worker’s battle with A.I.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The existence of call-center work, which is intrinsically dehumanizing and unrelentingly laborious, is considered a failure of our society.
The replacement or automation of that work, which creates displacement and impacts the livelihood of people who cannot adequately retrain, is considered a failure of our society.
What, exactly, would constitute success?
If the existence of these jobs is a failure of our society, what do you call taking these jobs away without any sufficient replacements that pay as well? There are plenty of places in the US where a call center job is the best job you can get without special skills.
We've been automating jobs for centuries and yet workforce participation has stayed in the 60-70% range. New jobs will always spring into existence to occupy the newly available workers.
Don’t worry, you wouldn’t even be qualified for the new jobs anyway, unless ofc they’re low skilled in which case you might barely scrape by on rent.
Random citations of examples of hard work, capped off with an accusation of hypocritical selfishness.
The word "progress" is not a justification, any more than the word "reform."
How the benefits from increased efficiency are distributed matter to how much progress benefits average people. Historically, efficiency increases from technology were driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it new classes of jobs and a widespread growth in prosperity. But crucially, the need for human labor kept pace with the expansion of wealth creation. This largely avoided the creation of a new distribution problem. But this time is in fact different. The expanding impact of AI on our economy will create a serious distribution problem as wealth creation becomes more and more decoupled from human labor. It is extremely narrow-minded to ignore this problem. It is not something that will just work itself out.
Said by people throughout history.
Bullshit. I've got relatives who can remember when call centers weren't a thing.
Businesses aren't here to fix society, they're here to make money. Giving them command is our mistake, not theirs.
Moderated capitalism is a beautiful thing. It doesn’t last without good minded people keeping it in check but when it exists, it seems to work the best to improve the human condition. Call center jobs may look like shit to some but to the ones that got out of poverty through them they were heaven send. Now their era is coming to a close and we just have to see what the next natural order of things unfolds to be.
These jobs are dehumanising because of how some companies treat people. AI wont change that some enjoy dehumanising others. A change in attitude, forced by law or social change, would fix that. Now that would be a success.
Presented this way it seems like AI would be the more frictionless option!
> A change in attitude, forced by law or social change
Exactly what would you like to force people to do? What's this "attitude," and by what process does it dehumanize people who work in call centers? Do call center workers have material problems, or is this a question of abstract mindset or aesthetics?
There’s obviously lots of different types of call center jobs, but I wouldn’t say they are all categorically dehumanizing. I worked as a support agent for a while in my early twenties, and the core of the work was not dehumanizing. But being poorly payed, clocked to the second and not being given adequate equipment or training to do the work well was. I can imagine a version of that job that I would have stuck with for longer.
Nonsense. Helping people with their problems isn't dehumanising. Following a script that your company has optimized to avoid helping the person is dehumanising.
> Exactly what would you like to force people to do? What's this "attitude," and by what process does it dehumanize people who work in call centers? Do call center workers have material problems, or is this a question of abstract mindset or aesthetics?
You could make them fiduciaries for the people calling in, or something slightly less extreme. Call center workers have problems that are superficially material, but addressing them on a directly material level would just be playing whack-a-mole; the unpleasantness of the position stems directly from the incentives that those who control them are under.
Digging holes in a random field for 8 hours a day for minimum wage to make someone else richer is rather dehumanizing. When it's digging holes for a fence in your yard, or for a community barn-raising -- the exact same work -- somehow it's less dehumanizing.
I'm not quite sure I follow. Aren't we talking about displacing these workers? How does that result in re-humanization? Can we assume they can easily obtain a job of better quality?
The people in the article find it one of the best jobs available and a path to a middle class lifestyle for their area.
Both things can be true. Call it Stockholm Syndrome to the economy or whatever, but things can be dehumanizing while people simultaneously feel lucky to have said work. It could be worse, after all.
The bigger question is if we are working on parallel paths to give these displaced workers equal or better opportunities to support themselves. Be that new jobs, avenues for them to educate themselves, basic income, or whatever combination of things raises the economic floor.
I do also fear that people will call these people dumb for choosing a career that could "so obviously be automated" but prior to a year ago their biggest fear would be outsourcing to India or Brazil. I wouldn't expect this type of person to even believe it was a realistic possibility until the last 6 months, once this stuff started to hit mainstream. I'll make a prediction that we'll see them in vogue within the next year or two. I also wouldn't be surprised if we see similar sentiment in the comments.
I've listened into conversations whilst someone is ringing my number, its quite interesting the conversations that go on at a company before the customer answers the phone!
Youtube reminds me the voice recognition and thus subtitles is not that good!
I couldn't do it, but I can definitely see why it would have a high upside for some.
Is that really the end of the world? When I have several issues (banking, electrical/phone/gas company) I want to speak with a human.
The only sure way to not have "dehumanizing and unrelentingly laborious" jobs is to not have jobs at all.
Personally I want to see AI take over handling 100% of the calls from confused people who could have just used the website to accomplish their task but are too clueless. Then keep enough humans to exclusively deal with all the actually worthwhile calls, like mine. (I never call unless it can’t be done online.)
If people actually want a jobs program (uneconomic work created strictly for the sake of providing income), call it what it is, and at least have people fill potholes, or something else humans are actually better at than machines.
Half a billion dollars for a startup by two techbros, but the Times can't afford the cost of their employees unionizing?
I guess I'm not in the least bit surprised then that every time I happen to click on an article from The Athletic out of boredom, it feels like something a freshman journalism major might write and then later be embarrassed about...and that every article I've read has been attributed to "The Athletic Staff."
Sidenote: it always amazes me that in the US, you supposedly need permission from a complicated, slow federal bureaucracy to be "recognized" and thus protected from retaliation for actions.
It's not cost, it's control...
We have two big problems to solve. First is figuring out if we’ll need a safety net for the first wave of automated workers, or if more jobs will be quickly created.
Second, which is more difficult, we need to make sure most people still have the purpose they derive from work. No matter how shitty a job might look from the outside, I wager most people still borrow a strong sense of identity from them. And if they lose that, shit will get weird.
The whole concept of paying UBI to everyone so they become artists is complete BS. A lot of people will just be depressed or behave in a way that negatively impacts society. Jobs are a good way to keep social order.
But telling sob stories about workers about to lose their job doesn’t solve any of these problems. It just makes people feel afraid of the future, which is counter productive.
Technology doesn't immediately raise everyone's standard of living. Distribution of wealth from technology increases standards of living. But until we solve the distribution problem, technology will just exacerbate inequality and reduce standards of living for those not useful to the economy.
In fact it would be much more healthy for call-center workers to spend their time outdoors growing potatoes, instead of sitting indoors just to afford said potatoes. Lots of underpaid jobs like this are inherently unhealthy for humans.
Part of middle-class striver religion is that recognition for your labor is the only way to have an identity (or a "worth," both metaphorically and literally.) What you are in that worldview is exactly what the people who can pay think you are.
You say "if more jobs will be quickly created" as though that's what determines whether we "need" a safety net. The reality is that those capable of providing that safety net will only decide it's "needed" if they risk facing any consequences for not providing one.
Part of the problem is that people whose entire professions have ceased to exist, aren't always in a position to pivot to something else. If a skilled profession disappears entirely, those early in their careers can go back to school/training and switch to something else. But even if successful, they're usually on the hook for the cost of that education.
Enter into the equation those within, say 10-15 years from retirement, and do we honestly expect them to pickup student loans at age 55 that still won't be paid off when they're in their 80s?
Instead, they'll end up in a lower or un-skilled profession, their quality of life will permanently decrease, and our cultural response is to say "well, sucks to be you."
And then we wonder why so many people have resentful, crab in a bucket mentalities.
I'm quite certain that even the current generation of AI could already make 10-20% of first-world jobs obsolete, but of course those in power don't want that to happen. Not because of the poverty that would create, but because they don't want so many people having so much free time at their hands.
In the US, they’ll be left to rot like they were before in the industrial Midwest, post-NAFTA. Or is happening now in most major US cities, where real estate speculation is favored over everything else, resulting in an affordability crisis and widespread homelessness.
They have to juice the masses for productivity as well so they can be taxed!
Where is this coming from? Got any data?
In fact, we actually have strong evidence to support this claim that people would do "work." There are plenty of people who have amassed so much wealth that their family would not need work for several generations while maintaining an extravagant lifestyle. There's 182 people with >= $10bn, which I think we can say is a pretty conservative estimate for calculating indefinite luxury (let's again be conservative and say that's $1m/yr spending per person, and a they can gain a 2.5% return per year). I don't know everyone on Forbes list, but I'd be shocked if a quarter of them did not work. Gates and Buffet have both "worked" into their old age. I don't see why an average person wouldn't either.
People just get too fucking bored to not "work." Hell, look at how many open source projects there are. I'd only expect those to grow.
Some people are just hardwired to be productive. It's part of why they became billionaires. A better judge would be to look at the children of wealthy people that were born in the lap of luxury. Do their activities generally reach the potential that their status gave them, or do they waste their days on frivolous pursuits? I don't have any stats, but we all know of plenty of stories of rich children that grew up to be useless drains on their parents finances. Given the endless stream of of entertainment afforded by modern life, if people's means of living comfortably were taken care of, I bet a large portion of people receiving UBI would do nothing productive.
I often ask people how we could modify a economy to support 10% automation of the workforce. Where 10% of people are not only displaced, but that we do not gain an additional 10% of new jobs which could be filled by humans.
The most reasonable answer I've ever gotten was jobs programs. But I don't think this actually solves things, and neither did that person. It's just a tax and prevents people from... being the most human they can be. It also prevents us from reaching post scarcity.
Now I don't actually believe that 10% of jobs in Western countries could be replaced. There's 135m people employed in America and AI can't even replace the 2.4m janitorial staff that we have. AI isn't needed to replace the 3.8m retail staff (#1), 3.4m cashiers (#3), or 3.2m fastfood workers (#4), where the first two have already seen significant disruption and the latter is still unsolved since AI can't "flip burgers" good enough yet (yes, I know there are burger flipping robots, you're missing the point). But they still can't replace health care aids (#2), nurses (#5), or even movers (#8). I'd really encourage you to check out the most popular jobs[0] and ask yourself if you truly can disrupt them. Because if so, you should probably apply for a y-combinator seed round. Or AI just isn't as far as many people think it is. Replacing the one cashier and one person working the drive-through (both people multi-task btw) isn't going to significantly reduce the 8 people working during any given shift at a taco bell.
[0] https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Careers/careers-larges...
People are used to technologies that have a certain set of capabilities, where people find new ways to apply this technology over time. For example smartphones basically do the same kind of things they did 10 years ago, but people have found many more industries to apply them in (by writing apps).
AI is fundamentally different because the capabilities of the base technology are growing rapidly, at the same time as people are finding more applications for it.
So when you look into the future, you don’t just have to forecast increased applications of AI, you also have to forecast broader capabilities of the base technology. It is no use to take GPT-4’s capabilities and cast those into the future.
This is true, but we cannot say "ChatGPT is huge now, and in 5 years we will have the tech to replace humans" when we have no real evidence that that is the case either...
It already does if you go by the labor participation rate.
The traditional prescription for unemployment caused by technological innovation is to artificially decrease the employee pool by taking away both ends of the workforce (after shorting them by age). The elderly get retirement, and the young go to compulsory school. This was fine for dealing with the introduction of combustion engines, steam engines and early electricity adaptation but eventually even this was insufficient.
Which is why so many young adults 18-25 are put into higher education to artificially drag out the time until they enter their chosen careers. They're not necessarily there to obtain a specific set of skills or education, as if that were the case employers would be more willing to hire talented & skilled but diploma or certification lacking applicants (that are automatically tossed out of the running by mostly automated job applicant filters).
The problem is that this requires piles of money to sustain, and our leadership is already trying to crawl back retirement by upping the retirement age even as US life expectancy has been trending down for years (incl pre-COVID).
Most likely: We'll see people deemed redundant by the marketplace left to "let nature run its course" and die off from poverty (via addiction, avoidable medical problems, malnutrition etc). This has been what was already dragging down life expectancy in the post 2008-crash America.
Having automated transcription and summarization (approved by the user) will return a ton of time to them and make them more efficient.
And they could never be replaced, imo. The human impact in our sector is too important. A machine cannot, at least not yet, sympathize, joke, and persuade in the right balance, especially when the other party is emotionally agitated.
> A machine cannot, at least not yet
I think we really need to get away from this idea that people can never be replaced. You've contradicted yourself with "at least not yet" two sentences later - that's not to criticize you, I think you're correct in the latter instance and doing something a lot of people do. They see the reasons that people can't be replaced now and just extrapolate that out to forever, while sort of handwaving away the fact that they realize that AI is rapidly improving.
I think it's very clear that humans in these roles will be replaced in, say, 50 years. The question is how much sooner than that will it actually be - 20 years? 10? 5? 1-2?
I'd also add that even the reasoning for why the human isn't replaceable here is debatable. I've never called a call centre for sympathy or jokes. It's always because I have a query I want an answer to or problem I want sorted ASAP.
Assuming the benefit of an AI call centre would be that I wouldn't have to wait on hold, I'd rather have the AI centre than the inefficient human one. In scenarios where an AI can't easily deal with the query, then sure, I see why it would be good to have a sympathetic human who can take the call, but 90% of the time an AI would do just fine.
I think this is what a lot of people get wrong about automation. Everyone likes to point out how their job has these one or two really difficult bits, while missing that 90% of the job is easy.
As an example, here in the UK a lot of cashiers have now been replaced with self-checkouts, despite the fact we're still far from fully automating the cashier's job. We still need a couple of people on hand when there's security tags to remove or when someone needs IDing, etc. But that doesn't change the fact there's far fewer of them because 90% of the job can be automated.
Not every problem has a quick solution. Many are thorny and include lots of variables and long time spans.
Imagine trying to choose the right treatment facility for a child with leukemia that will accommodate your insurance and finances. Or what sort of care a senior parent with dementia and diabetes needs.
When the stakes are that high, having a human who can appreciate your situation and emotional state is almost mandatory.
Well-implemented AI ought to eliminate a lot of those long time spans, though. No more escalation or transfers required, no time spent looking things up - you've got a call center agent who isn't accessing the relevant internal systems, they're integrated with them (as well as all other call center agents).
It's all over, folks.
This new tech wave will also probably create low entry / low paid jobs, just different ones. Maybe there's going to be entry level AI tuning or similar. It's hard to say how it will play out.
Everyone talks about how they don't know what new entry level jobs will open up when the AI automates everything.
When the delivery drones come, someone is going to have to go and retrieve them when they break down, or get stuck in trees, or shot at by someone...
Extreme poverty is nearing its end, globally, and with it this efficiency axiom will end too. As we get more efficient at delivering a reasonable quality of life with a lot less work the amount of labor needed decreases eliminating jobs which is a natural spiral. No longer is there a kind of global reservoir.
AI will be erasing professions starting from the middle. It's going to be a very interesting, unprecedented development.
Two things are important: first, how much value the AI will create. Second, who will capture that value. Assuming it creates an amount of value commensurate with the number of jobs it replaces, the only important question is whether democracies survive the transition. If they do, people retain political power and use it to retain economic participation. If democracies fail, well...
And in some cases it is antithetical to the business interest to let the customers solve the problem themselves, example: cancelling your ISP plan. Some state(s) (notably California) enforce giving customers the option to cancel online[1]; but most of these companies demand customers call in and be subjected to a wait queue, and a pathetic, dehumanizing customer retention plea before they are 'granted' the cancellation. The tools to simply cancel an internet plan are actively withheld from the customer. Will an AI change anything about that? Probably not.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/companies-mu...
For example, you call out documentation as something that needs to be improved so that customers can solve their own problems—what's wrong with that documentation taking the form of an interactive agent you can ask questions to? A well-trained chatbot (not raw GPT) has the potential to be much more useful for the kinds of queries that would otherwise end up at customer support than does a search engine on a bunch of docs.
Among many others, in no particular order:
* (borrowing from above) The interactive agent can force you to sit through however many menus/questions the company wants until you are "granted" cancellation. Good luck finding the right option if they make it difficult to navigate! All the while, you have a condescendingly "friendly" "conversation". At least with a real person, I can convey my message clearly, and even if they must still read certain things, they will know to do so more quickly. Have you ever dealt with Amazon's chatbot, which shows the "typing" graphic for a few seconds before giving what is obviously generated text, and it takes a few back-and-forth exchanges like this before someone real introduces themself in the chat?
* You can't quote it like you can actual documentation, which has knock-on effects such being harder to hold the company to account, not being able to give advice to friends & family, not being able to compare competitors before you open an account, ...
I think the attitudes that we have right now towards chatbots are shaped by the companies that don't give a shit—the tech really wasn't ready yet, so only the worst companies tried to force you to use a chatbot. We're on the verge of that changing, and soon a chatbot will be able to provide a better customer support experience than the average overworked call center employee. When that happens, I expect to see companies that care about their customers begin to make the switch, and we'll start interacting with implementations that really work.
Sometimes interacting with these call center workers is so infuriating, that I’d wager this is probably the most hostile interaction an average person probably has with another live human on some regular basis. When I think back to the times when I’ve been really angry in my life, talking to call centers has consistently ranked as the maddest I’ve ever been, and probably the maddest I’ll ever get. Imagine all of that simply going away with a competent AI – a net good for the world.
Call centers exist to serve the people who can't or won't RTFM online. You do RTFM online, so... rage.
AI-based support is likely to be the same: A chatbot version of the same old information you can already get on the FAQ and Troubleshooting section online. I don't know why we expect it will be different or suddenly unlock some Secret They Dont Want You To Know.
This is not my experience at all.
In the past couple weeks, I’ve had to call in to businesses to get the following resolved because it wasn’t something I could do online:
1. Get some bank charges reversed because the online interface explicitly said I wouldn’t get charged for the actions that prompted the charges. 2. Get DRIP enabled on one of my investment accounts. 3. Downgrade a credit card product to a different credit card. 4. Get pricing information about a financial product that wasn’t provided on a banking website. 5. Follow up with the fibre provider in my area because they’ve somehow connected every house on my street but tell me that my house isn’t eligible. (TBF this one isn’t actually resolved yet.) 6. (Twice ) call a bank because legitimate transactions got flagged as fraud and denied. 7. Get my address on file updated with a political party I’d donated to so they’d stop sending mail to an old address.
Matter of fact, attempting to educate customers instead of telling them what needs to be done to fix the problem can backfire because regardless of your approach it could come off as either condescending or blaming them for calling in.
Self included, I went to my bank a while back to do something and the guy told me I could have done it online and how,instead of just doing it and letting me leave asap. Yeah, I don't give a shit what i could have done online, i already spent too much time fighting their bullshit and I just needed the problem gone asap because it was an urgent situation. At least solve the problem first before you try to educate me.
Call centers have tiers, I do think LLMs can do tier-1 work because tier-1's basically work of a script/flow and LLM would just pretend to listen and react according to the script. Tier-2 and above however is a terrible fit for LLMs.
State your desire to terminate. When a "conversation" begins, simply & robotically repeat your desire. Repeat as necessary.
It works.
I have never tried it, but I sort of want to...
BofA has actually a nice system. I can hit 'call support' for from the app and there is a number added to the telephone number which icing identifies me. No need for me to searching various documentation.
Oh, and the fake typing noises while the AI / robots is 'searching'... they drive me nuts. Like who are you trying to fool here.
When did companies start treating customer interaction as a nuisance, a cost to cut, instead of an opportunity to build a stronger relationship and brand loyalty?
I mean, CfA sells objectively higher priced foods(for fast food), and people will still wait in line for it, because they don't treat people as a nuisance, so there has to be something to said for the business model.
If I want to return something or let them know about some issues with my purchase, I'd like to talk to someone on the other side of the aisle. I'd hate to "talk" to a chatbot and waste time trying to get to a human representative. Heck, I highly doubt this would work for old people, angry people, etc...
I could see a company selling its products with "100% human touch" as a marketing gimmick.
But I could see something ChatGPT-level working in 95% of cases. Right now this doesn't work because of issues like prompt injection, difficulty of training on company data, etc. But I expect these limitations will be worked out over the next 5-10 years.
When you talk to a human they're often navigating the same decision tree but they're acting as an interpretation layer to translate your natural language into the specific series of commands the machine they're working with will accept.
It seems likely to me that an LLM would be able to provide that functionality.
As long as you’re extremely politely annoying it works every time in my experience.
I imagine the AI is meant to replace the type of call centers that are as useless as an e-mail form or a chatbot, but I don’t personally believe in something that useless. I mean, what’s the benefit? To make people who aren’t stubborn idiots go away with unresolved issues?
Yes, and it's not new. I know for a fact Google has been using QA specialist data results to train the AI at least since 2018.
E.g. there used to be armies of people watching YouTube videos in search for policy breaking content, and essentially all they did with each report was to train the AI.
A friend of mine who worked there used to tell me that there's tons of insane content being pushed on YouTube that you never get to see, such as children cartoons were at minute 24 there are random porn images or Hitler's speeches.
I don't mean to minimize the problems that this (pardon the term) disruption causes, or the much more concrete and immediate fact of losing one's job. But if we're going to have that discourse don't we need to confront that central question? Should these impossibly rote and dehumanizing kinds of jobs exist, or shouldn't they?
Automation hasn’t led to fewer jobs it just leads to changed jobs. Unfortunate for those affected but we shouldn’t be holding up degrading mechanistic jobs as examples of what we should hold on to.
I would prefer to speak to a good call centre worker than email back and forth or filling in forms that go into black holes any day of the week.
I have family and friends who have worked in call centers where they have quite literally been selecting lines from a script to read off. That's a very different kind of experience, and it's the obvious type of job for AI to replace. Those family and friends might be stressed to have to find a new job, but they're not going to miss it for its own sake.
You're framing this like a choice, when for most people doing such jobs it absolutely isn't.
---
>Should these impossibly rote and dehumanizing kinds of jobs exist, or shouldn't they?
It'd be nice if they didn't, but things just have to get done sometimes, rote, dehumanizing, or otherwise.
I don't think bullshit jobs should exist, but people keep paying money to do them, and people who take these jobs do so because they have mouths to feed.
I think callcenter jobs are bullshit jobs. But how else can people feed mouths?
So many people, so few jobs, but so much to consoom, so we invent bullshit jobs for them, lest people stop consooming, god forbid.
A bullshit job is more of a corporate office job that looks legitimate on the surface but the person does nothing of any value and the job really only exists because some manager didn't want to reduce his number of direct reports.
The question that precede this one is “should we care for people’s basic needs like housing, healthcare, food, etc?” In America, the answer to that question is largely “no” from which all the dehumanizing work then follows. Many conversations about AI on this site seem, perhaps intentionally, to elude this reality.
People aren’t angry at the prospect that these awful jobs will be taken away, but that their baseline survival will be made more difficult so that a handful of already wealthy people can get even more rich.
We've forgotten the lesson and we have to relearn it. The problem isn't AI - the problem is the owners of capital, who will be abusing and exploiting workers with or without AI. AI as technology is a wonderful achievement and the product of a great deal of proletarian intellectual labour, built on the intellectual labour of society as a whole - it is ours, and it is fantastic once we restore control to its rightful owners. Unemployment, homelessness, lack of healthcare aren't caused by AI, they're caused by an economic system which demands unemployment, homelessness, and which throws in the lack of healthcare for free. Accordingly, we cannot prevent unemployment by fighting AI - it has never worked in history and it won't work now, like fighting the mailman to "prevent" a court summons. We have to identify and fight the root cause, not the tools that both we and they use or will use.
While I agree with a lot of what you said about the challenges of these roles, my company is actively providing opportunities for our call centre folks to access internal re-training programs (designed in collaboration with professional educational institutions) to bring them into junior development and product roles within the company, as we transition more and more to a self-serve model (and therefore need less and less call centre agents).
Obviously this is not for everyone (our first cohort was 60 people and we had just over 1,000 applicants, out of which only about 30% met the qualifications).
It's been a very successful first cohort in 2022-23 and one thing these re-trained folks bring to the table as transferable skills is a very clear understanding of the problems and shortcomings of our service offerings, having been at the "failure" end of many processes as you put it.
As a result, many of them are very quickly contributing way more than a junior who is coming in straight from bootcamps or the outside, and are helping improve our products in meaningful ways that might have been hard, or expensive, to suss out by our existing product teams.
So if these jobs didn't exist, we wouldn't have these smart humans coming into our teams with that real-world experience.
Hiring good people is hard, and if you have folks in your organization who have been there a long time (the program is only open to employees who have been with the company for more than 5 years), then why not reward that loyalty with an opportunity to transform yourself at the same time as the business transforms itself?
> what happens to the 70% who "don't meet qualifications?" They now no longer have a job and have told they aren't able to succeed or advance
They stay in their current (unionized) job, and can still access other opportunities for advancement within the company, like they always have. We have a long and proven track record of promoting out of our call centres and into our business and management practices, this is just a specific program to help grow out digitization business.
This isn't a "retrain or layoff" situation, sorry if that was somehow implied. Our company will continue to need call centre humans for many many years to come I suspect. We just need less of them.
Also for anyone who is accepted into the re-training program, their job is secure until they choose to take a new role. At any point during the training program (which lasts about 16 weeks), they can go back to their old job if this isn't what they expected or wanted.
They also continue to get their salary and benefits while they're in the full-time training program.
The only commitment is that if they go through the full program and take on a new role, they need to stay in that role for 2 years or more, otherwise they have to re-pay a prorated amount for the training program (because we pay our training partner for each person who takes the program) based on how soon after the program they left.
Sure it would be good for people to do jobs that are on the next level up in terms of complexity. However, AI is coming for those jobs also.
The answer always boils down to greed. Every single time.
It's strange to think that somebody would fight to keep that job.
It illustrates the depths of the ubiquitous mindfuck under which we operate.
I mean, what if the torture was replaced with a more obvious torture? What if you spent 8 hours a day getting your fingernails pulled out? At a good hourly rate and with nice benefits of course.
Would we squeak?
Speaking as someone who worked in a call center for less than a month before quitting because I hated every second of it, having your fingernails pulled out seems a lot worse. I'd take the call center job.
Another thing that's worse is being broke, I'd take the call center job over that too, if those were my only choices. I'm not sure about a ubiquitous mindfuck, but I know we operate under the need for food and shelter.
For a more extreme example: most of us wouldn't think about applying for the job of a hangman, but whenever there was a vacancy, the authorities were inundated with applications.
> Within months of working at the casino, Ms. Sherrod felt the toll of the job on her body. Her knees ached, and her back thrummed with pain. She had to clean at least 16 rooms a day, fishing hair out of bathroom drains and rolling up dirty sheets.
> When a friend told her about the jobs at AT&T, the opportunity seemed, to Ms. Sherrod, impossibly good. The call center was air-conditioned. She could sit all day and rest her knees. She took the call center’s application test twice, and on her second time she got an offer, in 2006, starting out making $9.41 an hour, up from around $7.75 at the casino.
I think we need to explore post scarcity politics and economics to understand how we can support all of the people who lose their jobs. How to organize society when people don’t need to work is a political question, not a technical one.
My favorite answers are Universal Basic Income and Fully Automated Luxury Communism.