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Comment by methuselah_in | Hacker News Reader

No offense, but how many people will be jobless because of this?

A huge number of these jobs will go yes. A call centre supervisor may be safe taking escalation calls that need a human and so on but the masses will be replaced by this kind of tech.

However what will actually happen is society will use these people to brick lay for houses, care for the elderly or something else. That's honestly a good thing for society as we have massive shortages there, and not a bad thing for the individuals as a whole.

> However what will actually happen is society will use these people to brick lay for houses, care for the elderly or something else. That's honestly a good thing for society as we have massive shortages there, and not a bad thing for the individuals as a whole.

Labor "shortages" for those jobs exist because they are not financially attractive. Why is it a "good thing" to eliminate more attractive roles? How does this materially reduce the cost of living, or increase for the roles you point to?

Let's say answering a phone is 11/hour and laying bricks is 11.20/hour. No big shock that people will take the phone job, but if you remove that option more people will flow into the laying bricks job.

Except that's not reality, because the wage for most bricklayers in the US is $10-12 higher than the call center job.

A byproduct is the drop in wages in the bricklayer job, as the call center workers that were fired are now fighting for the bricklayer jobs.

Also, let's not forget an underlying pillar of society; real-estate must never decrease in value. That doesn't really fit with the theory that we're going to build a lot of real-estate.

The difference is nowhere near as stark in the UK, and for society a reduction in the cost of building houses or infrastructure is good.

One of the pillars of our society is that real-estate value must never go down, and so I'm skeptical that a lot more people are going to start building real-estate.

The question is totally fair, but it's unreasonable (imho) to expect owners of this project to have to answer. We are looking at < 500 lines of python, mostly just gluing together SIP and agents.

My reaction was slightly different: how many companies selling this (meager) service at a high premium will go out of business now that it's free/open?

That is one of our goals. If a solution is under 500 lines of Python, you should not need to pay $499 per month for it. We want to lower the barrier for developers and businesses to build their own voice agents.

GitHub: https://github.com/videosdk-live/agents

https://docs.videosdk.live/ai_agents/voice-agent-quick-start

https://docs.videosdk.live/ai_agents/sip

Totally valid concern. The goal isn’t to replace people, but to offload repetitive tasks so humans can focus on higher-value work.

We’ve also built in Human-in-the-Loop support so a person can step in anytime the AI falls short. More on that here: https://docs.videosdk.live/ai_agents/human-in-the-loop

It’s about shifting roles, not eliminating them and doing it responsibly.

What you say is totally going to do opposite! In developing countries like India here people don't have too many skills are going to face the heat anyways

I'm not convinced that most companies are going to choose shifting all those people to "higher value work", when the alternative is firing at least some of them them to improve short-term shareholder profits.

it turns out many professions are essentially a long loop of repetitive tasks. Think telemarketing, or phone support, for instance. What kind of "higher-value work" would a phone support agent do?

> The goal isn’t to replace people [...] It’s about shifting roles, not eliminating them and doing it responsibly.

With what knowledge you have of the entire history of capitalism ever, do you, genuinely and earnestly, believe this is what's going to happen, and there isn't, perhaps, a different outcome that is more likely?

We just hook up generators to bikes so that the former phone workers can now power the AI thats replaced them. This will eventually be a cheaper alternative to the current power grid as ai electricity consumption increases.

Ah, so THIS is the background story of that Black Mirror episode!

The same technology can also enable businesses that never had live phone support to offer it affordably. The goal is augmentation and access, not mass replacement.

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