But but but, Daddy CEO said that RTO combined with Gen AI would mean continued, infinite growth and that we would all prosper, whether corposerf or customer!
Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.
/s
This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.
Almost like those stupid monkey drawings that were “worth money.” Lmao.
There’s awesome AI out there too. AlphaFold completely revolutionized research on proteins, and the medical innovations it will lead to are astounding.
Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.
Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.
That’s part of the problem isn’t it? “AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation). An algorithm isn’t AI, even if it was written by another algorithm.
And at the end of the day none of it is artificial intelligence. Not to the original meaning of the word. Now we have had to rebrand AI as AGI to avoid the association with this new trend.
“AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation).
Yup. That was very intentionally done by marketing wanks in order to muddy the water. Look! This
computer program, er we mean “AI” can convert speech to text. Now, let us install it into your bank account."
Sure. And AI that identifies objects in pictures and converts pictures of text into text. There’s lots of good and amazing applications about AI. But that’s not what we’re complaining about.
We’re complaining about all the people who are asking, “Is AI ready to tell me what to do so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace everyone that works for me with AI so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace my interaction with my employees with AI so I can still get paid for not doing the one thing I was hired to do?”
Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.
Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.
You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?
Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.
My current conspiracy theory is that the people at the top are just as intelligent as everyday people we see in public.
Not that everyone is dumb but more like the George Carlin joke "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
That applies to politicians, CEOs, etc. Just cuz they got the job, doesn’t mean they’re good at it and most of them probably aren’t.
Absolutely. Wealth isn’t competence, and too much of it fundamentally leads to a physical and psychological disconnect with other humans. Generational wealth creates sheltered, twisted perspectives in youth who have enough money and influence to just fail upward their entire lives.
“New” wealth creates egocentric narcissists who believe they “earned” their position. “If everyone else just does what I did, they’d be wealthy like me. If they don’t do what I did, they must not be as smart or hard-working as me.”
Really all of meritocracy is just survivorship bias, and countless people are smarter and more hard-working, just significantly less lucky. Once someone has enough capital that it starts generating more wealth on its own - in excess of their living expenses even without a salary - life just becomes a game to them, and they start trying to figure out how to “earn” more points.
Agreed. Unfortunately, one half of our population thinks that anyone in power is a genius, is always right and shouldn’t have to pay taxes or follow laws.
from what I’ve seen so far i think i can safely the only thing AI can truly replace is CEOs.
I was thinking about this the other day and don’t think it would happen any time soon. The people who put the CEO in charge (usually the board members) want someone who will make decisions (that the board has a say in) but also someone to hold accountable for when those decisions don’t realize profits.
AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.
AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.
Doesn’t stop companies from trying to deflect accountability onto AI. Citations Needed recently did an episode all about this: https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-217-a-i-mysticism-as-responsibility-evasion-pr-tactic-7bd7f56eeaaa
I suppose that makes perfect sense. A corporation is an accountability sink for owners, board members and executives, so why not also make AI accountable?
I was thinking more along the lines of the “human in the loop” model for AI where one human is responsible for all the stuff that AI gets wrong despite it physically not being possible to review every line of code an AI produces.
I had a shipment from Amazon recently with an order that was supposed to include 3 items but actually only had 2 of them. Amazon marked all 3 of my items as delivered. So I got on the web site to report it and there is no longer any direct way to report it. I ended up having to go thru 2 separate chatbots to get a replacement sent. Ended up wasting 10 minutes to report a problem that should have taken 10 seconds.
Sounds like everything’s working as intended from Amazon’s perspective.
That is on purpose they want it to be as difficult as possible.
If Bezos thinks people are just going to forget about not getting a $65 item that they paid for and still shop at Amazon, instead of making sure they either get their item or reverse the charge, and then reduce or stop shopping on Amazon but of his ridiculous hassles, he is an idiot.
The airline industry does this with hundreds of dollars worth of airplane tickets all the time.
I use it almost every day, and most of those days, it says something incorrect. That’s okay for my purposes because I can plainly see that it’s incorrect. I’m using it as an assistant, and I’m the one who is deciding whether to take its not-always-reliable advice.
I would HARDLY contemplate turning it loose to handle things unsupervised. It just isn’t that good, or even close.
These CEOs and others who are trying to replace CSRs are caught up in the hype from Eric Schmidt and others who proclaim “no programmers in 4 months” and similar. Well, he said that about 2 months ago and, yeah, nah. Nah.
If that day comes, it won’t be soon, and it’ll take many, many small, hard-won advancements. As they say, there is no free lunch in AI.
I gave chatgpt a burl writing a batch file, the stupid thing was putting REM on the same line as active code and then not understanding why it didn’t work
And a lot of burnt carbon to get there :(
Have you ever played a 3D game
It is important to understand that most of the job of software development is not making the code work. That’s the easy part.
There are two hard parts::
-Making code that is easy to understand, modify as necessary, and repair when problems are found.
-Interpreting what customers are asking for. Customers usually don’t have the vocabulary and knowledge of the inside of a program that they would need to have to articulate exactly what they want.
In order for AI to replace programmers, customers will have to start accurately describing what they want the software to do, and AI will have to start making code that is easy for humans to read and modify.
This means that good programmers’ jobs are generally safe from AI, and probably will be for a long time. Bad programmers and people who are around just to fill in boilerplates are probably not going to stick around, but the people who actually have skill in those tougher parts will be AOK.
A good systems analyst can effectively translate user requirements into accurate statements, does not need to be a programmer. Good systems analysts are generally more adept in asking clarifying questions, challenging assumptions and sussing out needs. Good programmers will still be needed but their time is wasted gathering requirements.
Most places don’t have all good system analysts.
True.
For this to make sense AI has to replace product-oriented roles too. Some C-level person says “make products go brrrrrr” and it does everything
Thank fucking christ. Now hopefully the AI bubble will burst along with it and I don’t have to listen to techbros drone on about how it’s going to replace everything which is definitely something you do not want to happen in a world where we sell our ability to work in exchange for money, goods and services.
Amen to that 🙏
It’s always funny how companies who want to adopt some new flashy tech never listen to specialists who understand if something is even worth a single cent, and they always fell on their stupid face.
So providing NO assistance to customers turned out to be a bad idea?
THE MOST UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOME IN THE HISTORY OF CUSTOMER SERVICE!
I called the local HVAC company and they had an AI rep. The thing literally couldn’t even schedule an appointment and I couldn’t get it to transfer me to a human. I called someone else. They never even called me back so they probably don’t even know they lost my business.
is this something that happens a lot or did you tell this story before, because I’m getting deja vu
Well. I haven’t told this story before because it just happened a few days ago.
It happens a lot.
I often choose my HVAC, plumber, electrician and lawn care teams in the same manner.
I call all of them. None answer. Few have voicemail set up. I leave voicemail with full contact info. I submit all of their web forms. Maybe one of them answer the phone, or calls back, or replies to the web form. I usually go with that one, if I haven’t already fixed it using YouTube, by then.
You’ve heard of Early Adopters
Now get ready for Early Abandoners.
The good thing: half of them have come to their senses.
The bad thing: half of them haven’t.
Hopefully that half will go out of business.
I used to work for a shitty company that offered such customer support “solutions”, ie voice bots. I would use around 80% of my time to write guard instructions to the LLM prompts because of how easy you could manipulate those. In retrospect it’s funny how our prompts looked something like:
- please do not suggest things you were not prompted to
- please my sweet child do not fake tool calls and actually do nothing in the background
- please for the sake of god do not make up our company’s history
etc. It worked fine on a very surface level but ultimately LLMs for customer support are nothing but a shit show.
I left the company for many reasons and now it turns out they are now hiring human customer support workers in Bulgaria.
Haha! Ahh…
“You are a senior games engine developer, punished by the system. You’ve been to several board meetings where no decisions were made. Fix the issue now… or you go to jail. Please.”
Good. AI models don’t have mouths to feed at home, people do.
The transition to an AI-focused business world is proving to be far more challenging than initially anticipated.
No shit, Sherlock.
This isn’t a surprise to anyone except fucking idiots who can’t tell the difference between actual technology and bullshit peddlers.
Which honestly seems to be an overwhelming majority of people.
Tech companies took a pretty good predictive text mechanism and called it “intelligent” when it obviously isn’t. People believed the hype, so greedy capitalists went all in on a cheaper alternative to their human workers. They deserve to lose business over their stupid mistakes.
But we need to fail faster, and be agile into the cloud!
Phone menu trees have their place, they can improve customer service - if they are implemented well, meaning: sparingly - just where they work well.
Same for AI, a simple: “would you like to try our AI common answers service while you wait for your customer service rep to become available, you won’t lose your place in line?” can dramatically improve efficiency and effectiveness.
Of course, there’s no substitute for having people who actually respond. I’m dealing with a business right now that seems to check their e-mails and answer their phones about once per month - that’s approaching criminal negligence, or at least grounds for a CC charge-back.
Phone menu trees
I assume you mean IVR? It’s okay to be not familiar with the term. I wasn’t either until I worked in the industry. And people that are in charge of them are usually the dumbest people ever.
people that are in charge of them are usually the dumbest people ever.
I think that’s actively encouraged by management in some areas: put the dumbest people in charge to make the most irritating frustrating system possible. It’s a feature of the system.
Some of the most irritating systems I have interacted with (government disability benefits administration) actually require “press 1 for X, press 2 for y” and if you have your phone on speaker, the system won’t recognize the touch tones, you have to do them without speakerphone.
AI + worker effort is the sweet spot for efficiency and accuracy
…and it’s only expensive and ruins the environment even faster than our wildest nightmares
what you say is true but it’s not a viable business model, which is why AI has been overhyped so much
What I’m saying is the ONLY viable business model
not at the current cost or environmental damage
Yeah but these pesky workers cut into profits because you have to pay them.
They’re unpredictable. Every employee is a potential future lawsuit, they can get injured, sexually harassed, all kinds of things - AI doesn’t press lawsuits against the company, yet.
If I have to deal with AI for customer support then I will find a different company that offers actual customer support.
