Ya I wasn't that impressed either. Definitely way over hyped by headline. It's a way less awesome xenobot that doesn't actually do anything without significant human input.
theluddite
joined 1 year ago
Even if that's a real demo, I still have two thoughts.
First, the technical capacity of it has nothing to do with our user experience. Indian people are just as good at delivering customer service as Americans are, yet when we outsource customer service, we make it worse.
Second, even in that demo, the chat bot didn't do anything. I very rarely call customer service for technical support. When I call, I normally need specific answers to me, or actions from the company, like a flight change, or an explanation for a charge I don't understand, or to coordinate warrantied repairs on something I just bought, etc. Notice that all the information the chatbot gave was general-purpose, googlable stuff. Companies aren't going to let their chatbots change your flight for you or whatever. What's going to happen is we're going to have to deal with an LLM that can't actually resolve our problems, and convince it to go fetch a human.
And CEOs must make themselves personally available to angry customers for a minimum number of hours per week.
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.
omg haha. Glad to have you! I guess the lemmy tech communities are pretty small ;)
I agree. Tech news, in general, is basically ads, some more thinly veiled than others -- it's a lot of "look at this new cool thing." And the tech critics, with the exception of Cory Doctorow, generally know surprisingly little about tech itself, focusing instead on the companies, their owners, their users, their financing, and so on. That can be very valuable, but I do think that it's missing a piece.
This is why I founded theluddite.org. It’s an independent site written by leftists working in tech and academia, mostly aimed at other people in tech and academia, but also for tech enthusiasts. We are not professional opinion-havers, which means we don't need to stay friendly with say Apple to get invited to their product launch or get early access to their new service or whatever, and that's good, because I hate apple. I myself am the main writer for the luddite, and I write code for a living every day, and have been for going on 13 years. It's something that surprisingly few tech commentators have ever done. Because of our jobs, we know how technology and the industry actually work. That's why, while other people can write about Google's court case, we can just straight up show you how google is breaking the internet.
We're mostly interested in how that intersects with human agency and society. It's also explicitly anti-capitalist. That may or may not be your jam, but given the nature of this post, I assume you're at least a little skeptical of a system which fills everything with ads and pretends it's news :).
I am! The US military's fossil fuel usage is very well-documented and a matter of public record. Here's a forbes article about it, titled The U.S. Military Emits More CO2 Than Many Industrialized Nations . Forbes isn't exactly a left-wing rag!
If you're in the US, even if you personally literally stop eating, breathing, and even moving, the US military is emitting such an enormous amount of carbon on your behalf that you still have among the worst "carbon footprint" (a dubious concept generally but useful for this discussion) on earth.
Personally, I'm a member of several socialist groups, because I believe only large, structural changes can fix this, even before we talk about fixing them equitably. The DSA is active in your area, so that's a really good place to start. There's also an Extinction Rebellion chapter in your area. Another good place to start. If you have specific interests, say economics, I can suggest other organizations too.
Important question, by the way. Appreciate you posting it.
I'm going to politely disagree. We should be afraid, but not the helpless feeling you describe, but an actionable, productive fear. The kind of fear that you feel when you see a kid too close to the edge of the stairs, or when you meet someone obviously dangerous. It needs to be a focusing fear, because we need to act now, and it's going to be an unpleasant process. We're not going to be able to vote or buy or donate our way out of this. We're going to need to be angry and loud. People aren't going to like it, and that's when we'll need our fear.
Most of us are afraid of conflict, or looking stupid, or making people angry, or getting made fun of, or even being arrested. We need to be more afraid of climate change so that we don't care, like a parent who sees their kid in trouble and just dives, without worrying about how stupid they're going to look after. We need to be afraid enough that the normal routines of our daily lives become intolerable, because those routines will be disrupted, whether we like it or not. The question is how we do it: We can do it now, which will suck, or when climate change comes for us, which will suck a lot more.
As for carbon capture, it's what I call a technological antisolution. It's a technical solution to a political problem that is incapable of actually solving said problem, but instead monetizes it, and further entrenches existing power structures.
Here's what I mean -- look at the big new carbon capture thing that was making the news just recently:
It's a deal with none other than Exxon Mobile. Carbon capture only exists because it allows companies to profit off creating the problem and its "solution." Antisolutions maximize GDP in the climate emergency. They even admit it without realizing it. From the article:
Carbon capture is a big boys' game," said Peter McNally [...] "These are billion-dollar projects. It's big companies capturing large amounts of carbon. And big oil and gas companies are where the expertise is.
What a bizarre coincidence that our most well-funded "solution" to climate change relies on big oil companies!
edit: (accidentally hit save before finishing) as for concrete steps, we need to organize. That always has been and always will be the solution to politics. We need to get together, and we need to demand that things change. It's going to take marches, strikes, protests, walk-ins, sit-ins, boycotts, ...
If you want to see an example of how to actually challenge power, take a look at what organizers in Atlanta are doing to stop the city from cutting down their forest and replacing it with "cop city," a training ground for the increasingly militarized police. They've been fighting it off for a long time now, and they're showing us what works and what doesn't, and, importantly, how loud and obnoxious you have to make yourself for power to listen.
This has been widely known for at least a decade. I worked for an Amazon competitor back in 2013, and industry wide algorithmic price fuckery, including trying to figure out if your rivals were scraping you and poisoning their data, was common and openly discussed as a normal part of business operations.
The explicit directive of our economic system is to make as much money as possible in competition with everyone else. Or course companies are going to pour resources into using any and all technological fuckery to do that.
It's actually the perfect metaphor for all the AI hype.