'AI May Not Steal Many Jobs After All' (apnews.com) 62
Alorica — which runs customer-service centers around the world — has introduced an AI translation tool that lets its representatives talk with customers in 200 different languages. But according to the Associated Press, "Alorica isn't cutting jobs. It's still hiring aggressively."
The experience at Alorica — and at other companies, including furniture retailer IKEA — suggests that AI may not prove to be the job killer that many people fear. Instead, the technology might turn out to be more like breakthroughs of the past — the steam engine, electricity, the internet: That is, eliminate some jobs while creating others. And probably making workers more productive in general, to the eventual benefit of themselves, their employers and the economy. Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said he thinks AI "will affect many, many jobs — maybe every job indirectly to some extent. But I don't think it's going to lead to, say, mass unemployment.... "
[T]he widespread assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, the way physical robots took many factory and warehouse jobs, isn't becoming reality in any widespread way — not yet, anyway. And maybe it never will. The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month that it found "little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment.'' The advisers noted that history shows technology typically makes companies more productive, speeding economic growth and creating new types of jobs in unexpected ways... The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks job cuts, said it has yet to see much evidence of layoffs that can be attributed to labor-saving AI. "I don't think we've started seeing companies saying they've saved lots of money or cut jobs they no longer need because of this,'' said Andy Challenger, who leads the firm's sales team. "That may come in the future. But it hasn't played out yet.''
At the same time, the fear that AI poses a serious threat to some categories of jobs isn't unfounded. Consider Suumit Shah, an Indian entrepreneur who caused a uproar last year by boasting that he had replaced 90% of his customer support staff with a chatbot named Lina. The move at Shah's company, Dukaan, which helps customers set up e-commerce sites, shrank the response time to an inquiry from 1 minute, 44 seconds to "instant." It also cut the typical time needed to resolve problems from more than two hours to just over three minutes. "It's all about AI's ability to handle complex queries with precision,'' Shah said by email. The cost of providing customer support, he said, fell by 85%....
Similarly, researchers at Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and London's Imperial College Business School found in a study last year that job postings for writers, coders and artists tumbled within eight months of the arrival of ChatGPT.
On the other hand, after Ikea introduced a customer-service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple inquiries, it didn't result in massive layoffs according to the article. Instead Ikea ended up retraining 8,500 customer-service workers to handle other tasks like advising customers on interior design and fielding complicated customer calls.
[T]he widespread assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, the way physical robots took many factory and warehouse jobs, isn't becoming reality in any widespread way — not yet, anyway. And maybe it never will. The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month that it found "little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment.'' The advisers noted that history shows technology typically makes companies more productive, speeding economic growth and creating new types of jobs in unexpected ways... The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks job cuts, said it has yet to see much evidence of layoffs that can be attributed to labor-saving AI. "I don't think we've started seeing companies saying they've saved lots of money or cut jobs they no longer need because of this,'' said Andy Challenger, who leads the firm's sales team. "That may come in the future. But it hasn't played out yet.''
At the same time, the fear that AI poses a serious threat to some categories of jobs isn't unfounded. Consider Suumit Shah, an Indian entrepreneur who caused a uproar last year by boasting that he had replaced 90% of his customer support staff with a chatbot named Lina. The move at Shah's company, Dukaan, which helps customers set up e-commerce sites, shrank the response time to an inquiry from 1 minute, 44 seconds to "instant." It also cut the typical time needed to resolve problems from more than two hours to just over three minutes. "It's all about AI's ability to handle complex queries with precision,'' Shah said by email. The cost of providing customer support, he said, fell by 85%....
Similarly, researchers at Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and London's Imperial College Business School found in a study last year that job postings for writers, coders and artists tumbled within eight months of the arrival of ChatGPT.
On the other hand, after Ikea introduced a customer-service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple inquiries, it didn't result in massive layoffs according to the article. Instead Ikea ended up retraining 8,500 customer-service workers to handle other tasks like advising customers on interior design and fielding complicated customer calls.
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Increasing worker productivity means more goods and services produced per worker, which means more goods and services available on the market for a given employment figure. If income inequality remains constant, everyone's consumption of goods and services can grown directly proportional to worker productivity.
Poverty is the state of being unable to get sufficient needed goods and services. Growing worker productivity - again, all issues of distribution remaining unchanged - directly fights poverty.
If a fa
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In 1767, the mean wage for a spinner was equivalent to the cost of two loaves of bread per day [history.pictures]. Don't give me this nonsense about how "they get paid less". *EYEROLL*
And are you really trying to claim that income inequality is HIGHER [ourworldindata.org] than in the era of lords and peasants?
Not to be negative... (Score:2)
Bu in this example the AI layer translates, so they need the same number of workers.
Most call centers can (and I think will) have 90% of the workers replaced by AI. And, for the most part, more "knowledgable", efficient, and much cheaper. BTW I've done analyics on call centers (AT&T) and can tell you that all of those recorded calls provide a very rich training set. I do think it will require keeping your best reps and rolling out stuff gradually so they can continue to update the training sets, so le
Re: Not to be negative... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Not to be negative... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people call for really stupid shit, though.
I've done phone support for a local ISP and have had calls for people who couldn't get their Harry Potter CD-ROM to work, and people who had Capslock on, etc.
The other way around I've had tons of frustrating encounters with oldschool 'chatbots' (basically web forms forced into question and answer forms linked to a weak FAQ/KB search), and endless calls with utterly incompetent unhelpful people hellbent on sticking to their support scripts.
We're already at the point that if a company has public forums of some kind, asking ChatGPT for solutions for your specific issue is by far the most efficient starting point.
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Yeah, like when I'm programming, 90% of the time it's much faster just to just ask an AI (Claude is my go-to for programming) than to Google it; Google has become my fallback option. It's mainly just needed for this scenario [xkcd.com]. Some obscure error message that you need to dig up in some old web forum from ages ago.
I like the experience more, too. Like, in Cursor, I can type a description of the goal into the AI before I've even assessed whether the fix will be long and tedious or just a quick typo, and star
Re: Not to be negative... (Score:2)
Same. At best the Chatbot can get ahold of the person in the right department to chat with or call . But I don't think I have ever had a chat bot fully resolve one of my problems .
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The problem is that if I could solve the problem on a website, I wouldn't be calling. Calling means I need something unusual. I'm not sure AI will do well with that.
It sounds like you know - and perform - the rudiments of problem solving. Be advised that there are massive numbers of people without this skill, or refuse to apply it if they do. They'll call for an update on their ticket - which they can see if they looked themselves. They'll log tickets for things they already have. They'll log tickets to fix things they don't have, but want to have. They'll log tickets to change something they don't have. They'll log tickets asking how to ask for something. They'll lo
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Most call centers can (and I think will) have 90% of the workers replaced by AI. And, for the most part, more "knowledgable", efficient, and much cheaper.
AI is at best on par with an Indian tech support line: e.g. it won't solve any problems, will piss off your customers, and will waste time and money. Though it does have 1 thing going for it: unlike an Indian tech support service it won't try to bankrupt your company when you realize it is losing you customers and wasting money, give it time to catch up though I guess.
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Both are horrible, and neither fixes your problem. The offshore call centers try reading a script in a heavy accent, and when they can't fix a problem, they will just hang up on you, or throw you on hold. The AI stuff -might- do something when it realizes it goes around and around in a loop, or it might just say "buh-bye", and cut the call.
Both are absolute failures in customer service.
Customer service chatbots still suck (Score:3)
Re: Customer service chatbots still suck (Score:3)
Solving the issue is a rather secondary concern with support departments. Their main purpose is to make you FEEL LIKE you have so support. That's why soft skills are valued more by them verses, you know, actually being competent. If the rep can make you think they care and are trying to resolve your issue you're not likely to cancel service/rant on social media/etc.
I've been watching this play out myself the last decade from the inside. Hiring standards going down for new reps. Most recently there has been
Re:Customer service chatbots still suck (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't underestimate just how many tickets are from people who can't find an easy to find answer.
How naive (Score:3)
Re:How naive (Score:5, Insightful)
We're still just at the start of what AI can do, and it already can do so much which is mindblowing, and it will only get better.
It seems your mind is easily blown. I am much less than impressed.
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You are grasping at straws. I, on the other hand, have followed AI research for something like 35 years and I am a CS type with an engineering PhD. Guess who of us two sees reality in the AI space more clearly.
Incidentally, the current LLMs are not "early products" which would then have a lot of room for optimizations. They are the end-product of about 70 years of research and they are pathetic. "Better search" and "better crap" is about all they can do and whether the search is really better is debatable.
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And funny how those without that qualification try to make it look worthless. Because you have _nothing_ except a big ego and inflated sense of your own opinion.
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Anyone saying AI won't "steal" mamy jobs in the near future, is completely ignorant and very naive.
"Ikea ended up retraining 8,500 customer-service workers to handle other tasks like advising customers on interior design and fielding complicated customer calls."
If Ikea needed 8,500 such people, why hadn't they hired them previously? The cynic in me figure next year there'll be a quiet press release about layoffs due to "restructuring" and "efficiencies".
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As far as I can see, LLMs appear to be an elaborate kind of mechanical Turk that automate repeating variations on millions of previously written
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If the text hasn't been written many times before, the LLM can't repeat the work.
ah, just like a real human. We humans learn pretty much the same way. We also 'copy' things from what we've seen and heard before, we wouldn't be here is people before us hadn't learned things from others and expanded on it, just like AI does. LLMs is just a part of AI, it isn't AI in itself.
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Re: How naive (Score:2)
That is more a result of poor educational standards then anything else. Rote memorization is only one part of the human learning process. It just happens to be one of the easiest, but not necessarily effective, ways to educate people.
Critical thinking is a bit more complex. Being able to take initiative, make observations and judgements about novel situations, and apply prior experiences in unexpected ways is still something computers struggle with. At best these technologies help take out some of the guess
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It'll still eliminate jobs (Score:2)
The flip side of technological advances making something less expensive usually means people will consume more of it. When tex
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You think people will consume more tech support?
Re: It'll still eliminate jobs (Score:2)
Given how tech illiterate people are becoming if Gen Z is any indication, that might be the case.
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I don't think it's any more or less than any other generation.
Truth be told, if anybody is feeling insecure about their job, it's more likely because they feel insecure about their own intellect compared to an LLM. I've seen my fair share of tech support people who can't troubleshoot. Basically if they don't have a script that covers the problem, then they're basically at their wit's end and have to escalate to somebody who can troubleshoot. Could LLM replace them? Probably. For a car analogy: If rsilvergun
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Truth be told, if anybody is feeling insecure about their job, it's more likely because they feel insecure about their own intellect compared to an LLM.
You have a point. LLMs have no insight, but tons of data. As such they are ahead of a human with no insight. And there are quite a few of those.
Re: It'll still eliminate jobs (Score:2)
Insecurity is one thing, but given how US companies like laying off employees even when they perform exceptionally I can understand the concern; labor being treated as a race to the bottom.
If the US did not have such a skewered view of labor and the employee-employer dynamic then I would agree that concerns over automation are exaggerated. But this is a country that outsourced nearly its entire manufacturing industry to poor countries to save on labor costs. Skills and hard work are not as valued as they on
Re: It'll still eliminate jobs (Score:1)
Insecurity is one thing, but given how US companies like laying off employees even when they perform exceptionally
If you were paying the kid down the street to mow your lawn until you replaced it with xeriscape that's basically zero maintenance and more environmentally sensible, then you better keep paying him anyways or else you're just treating labor as a race to the bottom.
Nobody in their right mind is going to just keep paying for work that they don't need anymore. Doesn't matter if you're an individual or a big business.
Re: It'll still eliminate jobs (Score:2)
Automation does not apply to just unskilled labor. Skilled, white collar jobs if anything are what will likely be hit the hardest. Turns out making a lawn mower robot is harder then making an AI model that churns out art and books in the span of a few seconds.
Also, you ignore the fact that employees do not see things the same way an enterprise does when it comes to layoffs. While a company may consider it necessary, employees will likely see it as a net negative and feel much less motivated to work hard. Af
Re: It'll still eliminate jobs (Score:1)
Automation does not apply to just unskilled labor. Skilled, white collar jobs if anything are what will likely be hit the hardest.
People have been saying this for decades. I still remember during the early aughts being told that IT and programming jobs were all going to India. Yet two years ago I got hired into a programming job after just one year of experience, and last year I brought in over $260k. I've seen all of zero indication that anybody wants to move what I do to India any time soon.
All I've seen of "AI" is it can make some rote things I do quicker, but that's about it.
Turns out making a lawn mower robot is harder then making an AI model that churns out art and books in the span of a few seconds.
That's just the thing -- they already did. A long time a
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Productivity gains = fewer jobs required.
We already have a ton of BS jobs that are unimportant... just how many jobs can we make up to keep everybody employed?
Augmented Intelligence is the real problem. An uneducated kid in a sweat shop playing a game that helps the machine do much higher skilled work is a bigger problem.
My dystopian future: the terminators keep farms of humans alive to solve CAPCHA like problems it struggles with. We become analog calculators.
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Fun fact: the word "computer" originally referred to a human who did computations. What you describe is kind of the word coming full circle.
copium (Score:2)
This is a massive increase in productivity (Score:1)
It's not just about direct job loss it's also about the massive increase to productivity. If productivity increases companies don't hire more they pocket those savings for themselves. Yes they might expand a little bit on their side but there are only expanding because they're taking over cus
Re: This is a massive increase in productivity (Score:1)
It's not just about direct job loss it's also about the massive increase to productivity. If productivity increases companies don't hire more they pocket those savings for themselves. Yes they might expand a little bit on their side but there are only expanding because they're taking over customer service roles from other companies as an outsourcer. But the net result is that you've got one person doing the work of two or three.
This lowers the barrier of entry for new competitors. While you personally will still not have a job because your only skill was replaced by a backhoe, most people will be fine.
obviously (Score:2)
nobody can steal something you don't have
AI must replace jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
If AI doesn't replace jobs then it isn't doing its job. Previous technological advances also contributed to population booms, massive infrastructure advances, and new industries. How will AI contribute to any of those things? The difference between AI and the major technological leaps in the past is that those previous leaps provided new capabilities. The steam engine allowed us to transport large amounts of cargo very long distances without relying on waterways. We could mine in remote locations and get that ore to major centers of industry.
What new capabilities does the crap OpenAI is producing promise? It's not designed to improve upon what we're already doing, it's designed to replace humans labor.
Misunderstood by old people in government (Score:2)
Here in the USA, it is now accepted(and hated), that many customer service jobs have been outsourced to places like India or the Philippines, where the people answering calls don't speak English well, but are working jobs that require talking to those in the USA, which creates a language barrier. If the job itself is done by those in other countries, then the government in the USA won't necessarily notice or care if THOSE jobs are replaced by AI, because they are already lost to the USA anyway.
Understandi
Whew! What a relief! (Score:2)
AI will replace knowledge workers (Score:2)
Like all technological change people overestimate how quickly the changes by AI will occur and underestimate how profound those changes will be. If your job is based on your knowledge of a topic AI can replace you. It has a perfect memory, it only needs to learn things once to "know" them and if will consistently provided the "right" answer once it has learned it.
On the other hand, if your job depends on human relationships, AI can't provide that. It can't empathize, it can't smile, it cant flirt, it can'
Hugely disappointing (Score:2)