[HN Gopher] A call center worker's battle with A.I.
___________________________________________________________________
A call center worker's battle with A.I.
Author : elsewhen
Score : 101 points
Date : 2023-07-23 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| splatzone wrote:
| If AI can replace abundant jobs in customer service, this will
| mean that the entry level becomes harder and harder for people to
| access. Because the work that's left for humans will become more
| skilled and complex - the stuff the machines can't deal with.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| Not all of them will be super complex.
|
| 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...
| fatfingerd wrote:
| Sure we already have that with scooter collectors.. If they
| keep working after VC money then the number of transport jobs
| they created are miniscule compared to the transportation
| they eliminated.
|
| 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.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| This is what I am wondering. The general entry path for IT
| (sysadmin) type jobs is get a front desk support job then start
| accumulating certifications. How is this going to that path? Or
| is AI erasing professions from the bottom up so no need for new
| workers into these professions?
| staunton wrote:
| > Or is AI erasing professions from the bottom up
|
| 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...
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| Do we also bemoan the loss of backbreaking agricultural jobs or
| tedious and dangerous industrial work that have been automated
| away?
| jprete wrote:
| Someone who was laid off from such a job and never got
| another one probably does, in fact, bemoan that loss.
| [deleted]
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yes we do, search the term 'rust belt'. Agricultural jobs
| turned to automotive jobs that turned to no jobs and wide
| areas of depressed economic activity.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There is no one "we". Many groups of people gained from
| cheaper goods and services. Some groups of people lost from
| loss of income.
| pixl97 wrote:
| And we shoved a million more people in prisons on that
| time frame, that are now an administrative burden on
| society. 'We' all pay for that.
| realce wrote:
| Yeah there's gonna be a whole lot of "comparative
| advantage" coming down the pipe, but the winners will
| become fewer and fewer by the day.
| tremon wrote:
| We do, similar to the mining towns of the UK:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-50069336
| p-e-w wrote:
| Don't worry - those "complex" tasks will be done by machines
| also, just 3-5 years down the line.
|
| It's all over, folks.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Sounds wonderful. If only we had a society that was explicitly
| concerned with the welfare of individuals who weren't
| criminals, selected children, or the victims of natural
| disasters, everybody's lives would instantly become
| significantly better.
| realusername wrote:
| Historically, each new tech wave also created more entry level
| / low pay jobs. The previous ones were Uber, package delivery
| workers ...
|
| 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.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Leading edge AI can already handle many skilled and complex
| tasks. Within a few years this will be widely deployed.
| swayvil wrote:
| Working in a call center is the worst. Pure torture. But that's
| common knowledge.
|
| 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?
| failuser wrote:
| They have an option to quit now. If the job is so awful, but
| people still do it the alternatives must worse. E.g. becoming
| homeless or an even worse job. I'm pretty sure we will see a
| spike in both.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Read the article. The other job options for her were worse.
| anonymousab wrote:
| In many cases the only options are equally shitty or shittier
| jobs with worse pay.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > I mean, what if the torture was replaced with a more obvious
| torture?
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Some people are not as sensitive as me or you. Diversity in
| action. (The real one.)
|
| 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.
| swayvil wrote:
| What's not to like? Wear a hood. Pull a lever. Get your fat
| check. It sure beats answering a phone.
| xur17 wrote:
| Ms. Sherrod from the article seems to disagree with you here:
|
| > 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.
| failuser wrote:
| Next step will be to finally make the demo of voice assistant
| calling support Google made a while ago real. Robots talk to
| robots to cancel subscription. In science fiction that would lead
| to AGI, but it will not.
| gipp wrote:
| Why do articles like this never confront the paradox at play
| here: these sorts of jobs are notoriously awful and dehumanizing.
| Their existence is often looked at as a failure of our system,
| even in the very same publications that are now publishing these
| sorts of articles.
|
| 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?
| shrubble wrote:
| People like the money they make more than the hassle of doing
| the job; it's a great thing for people that work in the
| computers/tech field love what they are doing, but not every
| job is like that.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Everyone I knew who had a call center job was very happy to
| leave.
|
| 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.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| It's quite priveledged to describe call centre work as
| degrading and mechanistic. It's a bit boring but it's
| clean, office based work where you get to use your brain.
|
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| Depends a lot on the call center. I worked in technical
| support for a while, and while dealing with awful
| customers was awful, I did get to use my brain and
| creativity to solve problems and that was fun.
|
| 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.
| flangola7 wrote:
| No, it is degrading. Most soulless agonizing job I ever
| worked, would cry on my commute home on many days.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I would rather work in a call centre over factory work,
| food production, retail, cleaning etc. None of these jobs
| are fun, but millions of people have to do them.
| fakedang wrote:
| I once did cleaning and groundskeeping for fun, back when
| my spine allowed it.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I work in a kitchen on weekends for fun.
| p-e-w wrote:
| > People like the money they make more than the hassle of
| doing the job
|
| You're framing this like a choice, when for most people doing
| such jobs it absolutely isn't.
| blululu wrote:
| It is clear choice between bad alternatives. Unless you
| realistically think we're going to make cash transfers a
| thing then this boils down to "better above ground in the
| rain than below in the dirt".
| sbarre wrote:
| I'll give a counter-point here.
|
| 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.
| Avicebron wrote:
| And that seems great that your company is doing that, but I'm
| not positive that is the norm. Also 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
| sbarre wrote:
| This definitely isn't the norm, but hopefully we see it
| more as time goes on.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| People make more money working a shit job than they make when
| they're unemployed. People endure dehumanizing shit jobs
| because they have mouths to feed. Unemployment doesn't feed
| mouths.
|
| ---
|
| >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.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| If everyone listened to PC, there'd be no janitors because no
| one would clean shit up if they had a million dollars.
| bonniemuffin wrote:
| It feels like we could cut out the middleman by giving people
| money for doing nothing, and letting the robots do the
| dehumanizing jobs. I'm not sure why people think it's morally
| superior to force people to do useless stuff to get the
| money.
| gmerc wrote:
| This. Anyone who does not understand this needs to check
| privilege.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| > Should these impossibly rote and dehumanizing kinds of jobs
| exist, or shouldn't they?
|
| 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.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Read the article. It's actually way better than the jobs she
| had before.
|
| 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.
| elsewhen wrote:
| https://archive.is/7IF4T
| ITB wrote:
| This is just the reality of the impending job displacement.
| Trying to prevent technology from advancing is not possible, and
| even if it was, it would limit everyone's standard of living,
| which is undesirable.
|
| 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.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| > Trying to prevent technology from advancing is not possible,
| and even if it was, it would limit everyone's standard of
| living, which is undesirable.
|
| 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.
| letrowekwel wrote:
| Nope, most people don't borrow a strong sense of identity from
| their jobs. They just do them so they can afford to eat. With
| UBI they could actually choose to do something which gives them
| a sense of purpose and identity. Doesn't even have to be art.
| Personally I enjoy gardening and growing food much more than my
| job. With UBI I could fully concentrate on that, instead of
| wasting my time on stuff I don't enjoy.
|
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > most people don't borrow a strong sense of identity from
| their jobs
|
| 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.
| xjaeekakappy11 wrote:
| [dead]
| reaperducer wrote:
| Every time someone talks about how great AI is going to be for
| business, I ask "how?"
|
| The answer always boils down to greed. Every single time.
| epolanski wrote:
| I'm not an AI enthusiast as many, but it's hard to deny the
| impact of ML in applications like copilot or Photoshop.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Any time I i have to call for assistance it's like pull pulling
| teeth.
|
| 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.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| They're not trying to fool anybody, they're just trying to tell
| you that they're still there. It's the audio equivalent of a
| spinning cursor.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| But do they really need 5 seconds of fake typing to look me
| up?!?
| godelski wrote:
| If it takes 5 seconds to perform the procedure, then yeah.
| IDK how these systems work, but I wouldn't be surprised if
| there was a explicit time delay added (like a second) to
| combat brute forcing. But come on, 5s isn't going to make
| or break your day. Chill with the instant gratification.
| silisili wrote:
| Funny, I can think of only two companies who I don't mind
| calling, and they are both financial institutions as well.
|
| 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.
| c0brac0bra wrote:
| In our line of business, our call center workers spend a
| significant portion (hours) of their time writing up notes and
| other information after calls.
|
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| > "Am I training my replacement?"
|
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| The New York Times recently outsourced its sports section to The
| Athletic, a YC startup which the NYT now owns. 35 sports
| reporters will be "reassigned". It's partly union-busting - the
| NYT is unionized, but The Athletic is not.
| BigElephant wrote:
| Not relevant here.
| [deleted]
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Didn't they retaliate against Wirecutter staff when they tried
| to go union, too?
|
| 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.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| "...but the Times can't afford the cost of their employees
| unionizing?"
|
| It's not cost, it's control...
| roadrunna wrote:
| [dead]
| svaha1728 wrote:
| Not looking forward to having to jailbreak a chat bot on the
| phone just to force it to cancel my account.
| xianshou wrote:
| Every facet of the article is designed to wring sympathy, but
| it's worth asking the real question: what is this advocating for?
| What kind of change (or stasis) would the author actually prefer
| to see?
|
| 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?
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >The existence of call-center work, which is intrinsically
| dehumanizing and unrelentingly laborious, is considered a
| failure of our society.
|
| 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.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| We will not run out of jobs because there isn't a fixed
| number of jobs. There's a fixed number of workers.
|
| 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.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| There's an approximately fixed number of jobs in time
| periods meaningful to humans. My rent is not going to wait
| for new fields to blossom in the wake of "progress".
| the_only_law wrote:
| > My rent is not going to wait for new fields to blossom
| in the wake of "progress".
|
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| > There's an approximately fixed number of jobs in time
| periods meaningful to humans.
|
| Bullshit. I've got relatives who can remember when call
| centers weren't a thing.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| If we didn't do "progress" we'd both still be farming in
| the dirt and washing our clothes by hand. It's kind of
| hypocritical to ask for it to stop as soon as it starts
| inconveniencing you.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is literally an excuse for anything I can label
| "progress."
|
| 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."
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| The benefits from past progress do not imply all future
| progress will be similarly beneficial. Our culture takes
| it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not
| clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society
| should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes,
| efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread
| prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local
| maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average
| person. We may already be on the other side of the
| critical point.
|
| 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.
| gumballindie wrote:
| People wanting to replace those folks' jobs without a plan
| for them are precisely the types of people that turned such
| jobs into dehumanising meat grinders. Petty power games and
| greed will not be replaced by ai thats for sure.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The first sentence is literally and nearly tautologically
| true, because they are the employers of the industry.
| Characterizing it as "petty power games and greed" is
| bizarre, though. They want AI for the same reason you want
| a calculator instead of having to hire someone to do your
| arithmetic.
|
| Businesses aren't here to fix society, they're here to make
| money. Giving them _command_ is our mistake, not theirs.
| indymike wrote:
| It's easy to say someone else's job is a failure of society.
| Contact centers do pretty important work, and not all of them
| are run as soul-sucking, penny-pinching, toilet paper usage
| measuring, hellscapes. At some point _work has to be done_ in
| most businesses. In many, the contact center is where the
| work is done.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| This is like complaining that a National Geographic documentary
| is too sympathetic towards Gazelles. Sometimes the documentary
| tries to show the plight of the cheetah too. You can totally
| elicit sympathy from someone while just showing the natural
| order of things and expecting no actionable change to come out
| of it.
|
| 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.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > which is intrinsically dehumanizing and unrelentingly
| laborious
|
| 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.
| 23B1 wrote:
| > A change in attitude, forced by law or social change, would
| fix that
|
| Presented this way it seems like AI would be the more
| frictionless option!
| pessimizer wrote:
| These jobs are not dehumanizing because of management. They
| are simply dehumanizing. If they were paid more, they would
| just be worth the dehumanization; getting hazard pay doesn't
| make a job less hazardous.
|
| > 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?
| fatfingerd wrote:
| I find that rather strange, IMO a first level support
| manager has a very dehumanizing job and gets paid less than
| top tech support staff. The lifers I've known also didn't
| want developer jobs as project pressures can feel
| persistent while a support engineer couldn't care less
| about your problems when they go home.
| lmm wrote:
| > These jobs are not dehumanizing because of management.
| They are simply dehumanizing.
|
| 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.
| tobr wrote:
| > These jobs are not dehumanizing because of management.
| They are simply dehumanizing.
|
| 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.
| godelski wrote:
| > A change in attitude, forced by law or social change, would
| fix that.
|
| 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?
| ITB wrote:
| Exactly, this topic requires purposeful journalism. Otherwise
| it's just doomerism.
| xg15 wrote:
| What would you tell the people who are out of their job thanks
| to AI and now can't pay their bills?
| xjaeekakappy11 wrote:
| [dead]
| epolanski wrote:
| > The existence of call-center work, which is intrinsically
| dehumanizing and unrelentingly laborious
|
| 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.
| bradshaw1965 wrote:
| <<The existence of call-center work, which is intrinsically
| dehumanizing and unrelentingly laborious, is considered a
| failure of our society
|
| The people in the article find it one of the best jobs
| available and a path to a middle class lifestyle for their
| area.
| godelski wrote:
| I've worked at a call center, it fucking sucks. Similar to
| retail you are the one who has to deal with the anger and
| frustration of customers due to poor company policies. What
| makes it worse is that you're a faceless entity on the other
| side of a magical voice box rather than face to face, in
| public, where people are more likely to watch their actions
| and how public responds to that. I'd definitely agree that it
| can be very dehumanizing. But there are plenty of people who
| enjoy the job too. Generally I've seen for those people that
| it is about the money and that they get to sit in an office
| with air conditioning.
|
| 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.
| darkclouds wrote:
| I would not be surprised if insurance companies who get
| claimants to call in, deliberately put people through these
| voice activated systems simply to listen in and see if
| their story is straight. Putting them on hold when going
| through the details is another way for the insurance
| company to listen in and see if their story is straight.
| People are lulled into that sense of safety that they cant
| be heard when on hold.
|
| 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!
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Working in a call center is terrible (I worked in one for 2
| years), and any call center worker will tell you the ultimate
| goal should be to identify and solve the problems before the
| customer needs to call in, and empower the customer to solve the
| problem themselves (with requisite tools and documentation).
| Replacing the call center worker with an AI won't solve either of
| these things; in fact it probably makes the act of interacting
| with the support 'agent' worse in many ways; just another hurdle
| to customers getting help.
|
| 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...
| lolinder wrote:
| The reason why the ultimate goal should be to solve the
| problems before the customer calls in is because of the amount
| of time wasted by both parties once things get that far. If an
| AI agent can reduce the time spent by both parties (no waiting
| on hold for the customer and no employee time for the company),
| then the goal is accomplished.
|
| 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.
| me-vs-cat wrote:
| > what's wrong with that documentation taking the form of an
| interactive agent
|
| 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, ...
| lolinder wrote:
| None of these problems are inherent to chatbots, nor are
| any of them unique to them. I'm not even convinced that any
| of these would be exacerbated by a chatbot--a company
| that's going to treat its users poorly will do so
| regardless of the type of agent they employ. And on the
| flip side, a company that cares about its users could
| absolutely design a chatbot that solves these problems and
| legitimately saves everyone time.
|
| 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.
| me-vs-cat wrote:
| Like you, I'd love to live in a world where, "if everyone
| behaves, things are much better for everyone". It's a
| great idea.
| badrabbit wrote:
| I don't know what call center you worked in but when I did it,
| no one cared about any of that, even if they did most customers
| didn't have the technical acumen to understand what they could
| have done to avoid the call. They don't want to know how to
| solve it themselves, they see solving problems as your
| responsibility since they paid for the product or service and
| you are it's support. Business customers are the only
| exception.
|
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| When I call a call center, I'm not looking for suggestions on
| how to solve the problem myself. This builds up nuclear level
| rage. If I'm calling it's because I want to delegate the task
| of solving my problem to someone who can click buttons and make
| it happen, _fast_. And if an AI can do that quickly and
| happily, then good riddance to those call center workers.
|
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| You get filled with rage because call center tech support is
| not for you. Call center support rarely is allowed to do
| anything you can't already do online and they are rarely able
| to tell you secret information that can't already be found
| online, and you have already tried online.
|
| 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.
| mrleinad wrote:
| I can think of at least one scenario where you need that
| call center worker. Let's say internet goes down in your
| area, but you're not sure where the problem is. Allowing a
| customer to call for a technician to come check the
| connection in your house might be a waste if the problem is
| regional. If too many people do that, the waste of
| resources compound. And you could argue that AI could
| diagnose where the problem is and choose what to do, but
| maybe it can't. You need that human to disambiguate the
| course of action.
| euroderf wrote:
| > and a pathetic, dehumanizing customer retention plea
|
| State your desire to terminate. When a "conversation" begins,
| simply & robotically repeat your desire. Repeat as necessary.
|
| It works.
| me-vs-cat wrote:
| We need chatbots on our phone to talk to their chatbots.
| JimtheCoder wrote:
| I heard that if you encounter one of those "Please tell me
| what you want help with?" voice prompts on a customer service
| call, you can just keep on repeating profanity and you will
| eventually get an operator.
|
| I have never tried it, but I sort of want to...
| gausswho wrote:
| Or use a virtual card (such as privacy.com for US). Create
| one to subscribe and delete it to unsubscribe.
| p-e-w wrote:
| The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment,
| so I have no doubt that those "lost" jobs will be immediately
| replaced by newly invented jobs, just to keep the whole thing
| going just a little longer.
|
| 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.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| > The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass
| unemployment, so I have no doubt that those "lost" jobs will be
| immediately replaced by newly invented jobs, just to keep the
| whole thing going just a little longer.
|
| 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.
| ITB wrote:
| It's not those in power wanting to oppress the masses. Humans
| with too much free time cause trouble. We don't want that.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| Don't forget income tax.
|
| They have to juice the masses for productivity as well so
| they can be taxed!
| epolanski wrote:
| > Humans with too much free time cause trouble
|
| Where is this coming from? Got any data?
| godelski wrote:
| I really don't get why this is such a popular belief. When
| you ask people what they'd do if they didn't have to work
| you find that they talk about hobbies, many of which have
| social value. Art, science, education, whatever. You do of
| course have to ask what they'd do after the initial relief
| of this burden, and specify long term rather than short
| term things like catching up on sleep or going on
| vacations.
|
| 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.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Riots during the lockdown? Nothing even a fraction as
| intense would have happened if people weren't stuck at
| home.
| godelski wrote:
| Is the cause of those things too much free time or are
| they actual social problems? If the latter, was it
| additional time that enabled them to actually attempt to
| address these issues or additional stress that resulted
| in surpassing the requisite threshold. Obviously some
| combination, but do you really think the dominating
| __cause__ of riots or do you think "riots are the voice
| of the unheard" (not advocation, but a warning).
| godelski wrote:
| > I'm quite certain that even the current generation of AI
| could already make 10-20% of first-world jobs obsolete
|
| 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...
| nmz wrote:
| Or they could go to war, to cull unnecessary humans, leaving a
| higher class with nothing but them and their servants, or I
| guess in this case, robot slaves.
| elforce002 wrote:
| Well, I don't like to call customer service but prefer that to a
| chatbot any day of the week.
|
| 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.
| devjab wrote:
| When companies we deal with don't offer human phone support I
| tend to call their enterprise sales departments and have them
| transfer me to someone who can help. I think the furthest I've
| gotten was once where I pulled the cell phone number of some
| CEO off their LinkedIn and called them directly because
| everything else had failed.
|
| 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?
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Current-gen customer service chatbots are pretty bad.
|
| 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.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| But chat gpt has lied to me in almost every session I've had
| with it. How will that work when it promises hundreds or
| thousands of customers something it hallucinated?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I think that at least part of my dislike of chatbots is that
| they force you to navigate an often poorly thought out decision
| tree in order to try and accomplish something.
|
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Doesn't always matter that you're talking to a human. Like
| when you call Comcast with internet trouble, and you tell
| them you've already rebooted the router but they make you do
| it again anyway because that's the first step in their tree
| and they aren't allowed to skip it.
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