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.
> 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.
>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.
Personally I want to see AI take over handling 100% of the calls from confused people who could have just used the website to accomplish their task but are too clueless. Then keep enough humans to exclusively deal with all the actually worthwhile calls, like mine. (I never call unless it can’t be done online.)
If people actually want a jobs program (uneconomic work created strictly for the sake of providing income), call it what it is, and at least have people fill potholes, or something else humans are actually better at than machines.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
You say "if more jobs will be quickly created" as though that's what determines whether we "need" a safety net. The reality is that those capable of providing that safety net will only decide it's "needed" if they risk facing any consequences for not providing one.
> 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.
Part of the problem is that people whose entire professions have ceased to exist, aren't always in a position to pivot to something else. If a skilled profession disappears entirely, those early in their careers can go back to school/training and switch to something else. But even if successful, they're usually on the hook for the cost of that education.
Enter into the equation those within, say 10-15 years from retirement, and do we honestly expect them to pickup student loans at age 55 that still won't be paid off when they're in their 80s?
Instead, they'll end up in a lower or un-skilled profession, their quality of life will permanently decrease, and our cultural response is to say "well, sucks to be you."
And then we wonder why so many people have resentful, crab in a bucket mentalities.
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.
> 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.
> The social system we live in cannot tolerate mass unemployment
It already does if you go by the labor participation rate.
The traditional prescription for unemployment caused by technological innovation is to artificially decrease the employee pool by taking away both ends of the workforce (after shorting them by age). The elderly get retirement, and the young go to compulsory school. This was fine for dealing with the introduction of combustion engines, steam engines and early electricity adaptation but eventually even this was insufficient.
Which is why so many young adults 18-25 are put into higher education to artificially drag out the time until they enter their chosen careers. They're not necessarily there to obtain a specific set of skills or education, as if that were the case employers would be more willing to hire talented & skilled but diploma or certification lacking applicants (that are automatically tossed out of the running by mostly automated job applicant filters).
The problem is that this requires piles of money to sustain, and our leadership is already trying to crawl back retirement by upping the retirement age even as US life expectancy has been trending down for years (incl pre-COVID).
Most likely: We'll see people deemed redundant by the marketplace left to "let nature run its course" and die off from poverty (via addiction, avoidable medical problems, malnutrition etc). This has been what was already dragging down life expectancy in the post 2008-crash America.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think we really need to get away from this idea that people can never be replaced. You've contradicted yourself with "at least not yet" two sentences later - that's not to criticize you, I think you're correct in the latter instance and doing something a lot of people do. They see the reasons that people can't be replaced now and just extrapolate that out to forever, while sort of handwaving away the fact that they realize that AI is rapidly improving.
I think it's very clear that humans in these roles will be replaced in, say, 50 years. The question is how much sooner than that will it actually be - 20 years? 10? 5? 1-2?
Tell you half brained friends who think they can fire their call support staff. Literally no one in the management world has gotten the memo because it is becoming harder to get a problem solved with a human when a google search or reading through docs won't suffice.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
If we want to live in a future utopia where the robots do all the work, then someone has to build the robots and design the AI.
I think we need to explore post scarcity politics and economics to understand how we can support all of the people who lose their jobs. How to organize society when people don’t need to work is a political question, not a technical one.
My favorite answers are Universal Basic Income and Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
[+] [-] elsewhen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xianshou|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] bradshaw1965|2 years ago|reply
The people in the article find it one of the best jobs available and a path to a middle class lifestyle for their area.
[+] [-] gumballindie|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] epolanski|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xp84|2 years ago|reply
Personally I want to see AI take over handling 100% of the calls from confused people who could have just used the website to accomplish their task but are too clueless. Then keep enough humans to exclusively deal with all the actually worthwhile calls, like mine. (I never call unless it can’t be done online.)
If people actually want a jobs program (uneconomic work created strictly for the sake of providing income), call it what it is, and at least have people fill potholes, or something else humans are actually better at than machines.
[+] [-] xg15|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rg111|2 years ago|reply
The only sure way to not have "dehumanizing and unrelentingly laborious" jobs is to not have jobs at all.
[+] [-] ramraj07|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ITB|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xjaeekakappy11|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ITB|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] letrowekwel|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rideontime|2 years ago|reply
You say "if more jobs will be quickly created" as though that's what determines whether we "need" a safety net. The reality is that those capable of providing that safety net will only decide it's "needed" if they risk facing any consequences for not providing one.
[+] [-] sgath92|2 years ago|reply
Part of the problem is that people whose entire professions have ceased to exist, aren't always in a position to pivot to something else. If a skilled profession disappears entirely, those early in their careers can go back to school/training and switch to something else. But even if successful, they're usually on the hook for the cost of that education.
Enter into the equation those within, say 10-15 years from retirement, and do we honestly expect them to pickup student loans at age 55 that still won't be paid off when they're in their 80s?
Instead, they'll end up in a lower or un-skilled profession, their quality of life will permanently decrease, and our cultural response is to say "well, sucks to be you."
And then we wonder why so many people have resentful, crab in a bucket mentalities.
[+] [-] xjaeekakappy11|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] p-e-w|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] godelski|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] sgath92|2 years ago|reply
It already does if you go by the labor participation rate.
The traditional prescription for unemployment caused by technological innovation is to artificially decrease the employee pool by taking away both ends of the workforce (after shorting them by age). The elderly get retirement, and the young go to compulsory school. This was fine for dealing with the introduction of combustion engines, steam engines and early electricity adaptation but eventually even this was insufficient.
Which is why so many young adults 18-25 are put into higher education to artificially drag out the time until they enter their chosen careers. They're not necessarily there to obtain a specific set of skills or education, as if that were the case employers would be more willing to hire talented & skilled but diploma or certification lacking applicants (that are automatically tossed out of the running by mostly automated job applicant filters).
The problem is that this requires piles of money to sustain, and our leadership is already trying to crawl back retirement by upping the retirement age even as US life expectancy has been trending down for years (incl pre-COVID).
Most likely: We'll see people deemed redundant by the marketplace left to "let nature run its course" and die off from poverty (via addiction, avoidable medical problems, malnutrition etc). This has been what was already dragging down life expectancy in the post 2008-crash America.
[+] [-] ITB|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nmz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bugglebeetle|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] c0brac0bra|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] idopmstuff|2 years ago|reply
> A machine cannot, at least not yet
I think we really need to get away from this idea that people can never be replaced. You've contradicted yourself with "at least not yet" two sentences later - that's not to criticize you, I think you're correct in the latter instance and doing something a lot of people do. They see the reasons that people can't be replaced now and just extrapolate that out to forever, while sort of handwaving away the fact that they realize that AI is rapidly improving.
I think it's very clear that humans in these roles will be replaced in, say, 50 years. The question is how much sooner than that will it actually be - 20 years? 10? 5? 1-2?
[+] [-] noobermin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splatzone|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CTDOCodebases|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cycrutchfield|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JimtheCoder|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p-e-w|2 years ago|reply
It's all over, folks.
[+] [-] realusername|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wildrhythms|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] WirelessGigabit|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] elforce002|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CSMastermind|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Legend2440|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] devjab|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] epolanski|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gipp|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] svaha1728|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] failuser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|2 years ago|reply
The answer always boils down to greed. Every single time.
[+] [-] epolanski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swayvil|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] sjducb|2 years ago|reply
I think we need to explore post scarcity politics and economics to understand how we can support all of the people who lose their jobs. How to organize society when people don’t need to work is a political question, not a technical one.
My favorite answers are Universal Basic Income and Fully Automated Luxury Communism.