Business owner ‘hires’ ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans::Experts divided on whether a new wave of call centre automation will make for better jobs for people, or merely throw millions out of work
I fucking hate capitalism and its demand that everyone has to work a fulltime job.
Job automation could and should be a good thing. We as a society should aspire to get rid of as many work hours as possible to actually do the things we like. Instead we are being forced to do shittier and shittier things because we are nothing more than slaves to some billionaires
Back in the good old days of the Stone Age we used to work 4-6 hours per day, based on the anthropological evidence we have (as Historia Civilis points out[1]). That seems to be the amount of work humans naturally slot into when left alone. Instead we work 8+ hours per day per 5 day work week. In European countries like the Netherlands, and the Nordics, for example, that’s slightly below 7 hours per day (on average, assuming a 5 day work week), so they’re getting close to the range we used to work. But a 4 day work week still seems like an almost utopian idea to achieve politically, despite all the insane productivity gains we’ve made over the last 100 years thanks to automation that makes even a four day work week seem laughable - we should probably be thinking of a three day work week at this point.
‘All billionaires’
“ Suumit Shah never liked his company’s customer service team. His agents gave generic responses to clients’ issues. Faced with difficult problems, they often sounded stumped, he said.”
my brother in christ thats a you/your company problem and an example of absolute failure to train
The article only slightly touched on this, but the incoming LLM customer service chatbots are going to absolutely fucking suck, just like outsourcing all the call centers made customer service actually a lot worse, not because people farther away are worse at customer service or anything, but because companies created rigid systems and scripts to remove any agency from its agents. It’s now common for these outsourced call centers to have an initial layer of absolutely useless positions who are only allowed to do a few things, and then they have to escalate to a “supervisor,” who is clearly just an agent with slightly more privileges, and this continues recursively forever. All this does is make the call last forever, but hey, they save some money, and customers like you and me are forced to spend an hour plus on the phone any time we have a problem with any large company.
Capitalist job replacement isn’t a one-for-one. So long as it makes more profits to do it, they will, even if it makes the service suck. When I have a problem, I need a person with some understanding and agency to resolve it on the other end. LLMs don’t know anything. Even a semi-fluent person with no admin privileges is so much more useful than an LLM. These companies are going to fire all these workers and make customer service an absolute fucking nightmare.
And if you support my bid for president, I will require every business over 50 employees to have a corporate office in every state they do business in (two on the extra large ones) , so no matter where you live, you can yell at someone face to face instead of into a phone with nobody listening.
That’s it. That’s my whole platform. No plans, just this.
And CEOs must make themselves personally available to angry customers for a minimum number of hours per week.
3 MONTHS MANDATORY CUSTOMER SERVICE AT VARIOUS STORES EVERY YEAR
doesn’t have to be all at once, but it DOES have to equal 3 months. And they have to get high customer satisfaction surveys like everyone else
I’m actually very torn on this. On the one hand, it will suck for customers with real problems to have to deal with poor customer service.
On the other hand, I work in IT. Most people call in with the stupidest questions that can be easily answered by a bot or by simply not being an idiot. And it really sucks to have someone intelligent deal with those questions 100 times a day.
You don’t see calligraphist or scribe as regular jobs anymore. It’s because the automated systems we created via typewriters and text editors were sufficient to replace them wholesale.
Sometimes jobs getting automated does not create sustainable jobs to replace them. That’s just going to happen more often as time goes on.
