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Comment by raytopia | Hacker News Reader

Now the real question about AI automation starts. Is it cheaper to pay a human to do the task or a AI company?

Humans have all sorts of issues you have to deal with. Being hungover, not sleeping well, having a personality, being late to work, not being able to work 24/7, very limited ability to copy them. If there's a soulless generic office-droidGPT that companies could hire that would never talk back and would do all sorts of menial work without needing breaks or to use the bathroom, I don't know that we humans stand a chance!

I have a bunch of work that needs doing. I can do it myself, or I can hire one person to do it. I gotta train them and manage them and even after I train them theres still only going to be one of them, and it's subject to their availability. On the other hand, if I need to train an AI to do it, but I can copy that AI, and then spin them up/down like on demand computer in the cloud, and not feel remotely bad about spinning them down?

It's definitely not there yet, but it's not hard to see the business case for it.

Once we get to that stage, unless you're a capitalist, remember that your job is next in line to be replaced.

Every tech drone in every cubicle considers themselves a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.

I write code for a living. My entire profession is on the line, thanks to ourselves. My eyes are wide open on the situation at hand though. Burying my head in the sand and pretending what I wrote above isn't true, isn't going to make it any less true.

I'm not sure what I can do about it, either. My job already doesn't look like it did a year ago, nevermind a decade away.

I keep telling coders to switch to being 1-person enterprise shops instead, but they don't listen. They will learn the hard way when they suddenly find themselves without a job due to AI having taken it away. As for what enterprise, use your imagination without bias from coding.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. What is an enterprise here - give me an example.

This is the ultimate business model.

I was about to comment that humans consume orders of magnitude less energy, but then I checked the numbers, and it looks like an average person consumes way more energy throughout their day (food, transportation, electricity usage, etc) than GPT-4.5 would at 1 query per minute over 24 hours.

It still not smart enough to replace for example customer service.

It's absolutely able to replace the majority of customer service volume which is full of mundane questions.

Such brutal reductionism: how do you calculate an ever growing percentage of customers so pissed at this terrible service that you lose customers forever? Not just one company losing customers... but an entire population completely distrusting and pulling back from any and all companies pulling this trash

Huh? Most call centers these days already use ivr systems and they absolutely are terrible experiences. I along with most people would happily speak with a LLM backed agent to resolve issues.

The CS is already a wreck and LLMs beat an ivr any day of the week and have the ability to offer real triaging ability.

The only people getting upset are the luddites like yourself.

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