this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
31 points (97.0% liked)
Futurology
3188 readers
57 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
When some people see news like this they try and reassure themselves that automation has always created new jobs. You don't see secretarial typists or horse carriage riders anymore, right?
The flaw in this argument is that the AI & robots will be able to do all the new jobs too, but they'll just cost a few pennies where humans were used to getting paid a dollar.
All the people who still think everything is hunky-dory with this and we've nothing to worry about remind me of videos of people on the beaches in 2004 watching the Indian Ocean tsunami coming in, and not realizing until the very last minute how serious things were about to get.
The flaw here is that the bots absolutely cannot do these human jobs, even right now. CEOs think they can / want them do, but that's only because they're greedy imbeciles.
I spent a loooong time trying to contact a human at my bank since I need to do my taxes and the form they sent me didn't have the info I needed. I looked online and it also wasn't there.
Their stupid AI bot could tell me basic info about where to find tax forms on their site, but when I said the one they sent me was wrong, it just kept repeating where to find the form.
It wasted hours of my life. Fuck these people.
There honestly should be a federal law saying businesses are required to put you in touch with a human if you ask them to. Taxes are required and I needed that info.
I've had that type of horrible experience with outsourced human customer service reps.
Every AI chat bot I've ever encountered had the ability to put you in touch with a human if you asked for it, even if it's not a listed option. Granted, that's a sample size of a few dozen out of millions.
Not this one. Both the chat not and their automated phone tree / bot would not put me in touch with any people, even after saying "representative" or pressing 0.
Caring about jobs is kind of silly. If there were no jobs there would be no customers. That's not how the market works. Someone is always going to try to sell something and they need people to support them.
The new technology has advantages and disadvantages. If you argue just from this angle, the gouverment comes to bad ideas like just to prohibit AI.