The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

> AI inference demand is directed at improving actual earnings. Companies are deploying intelligence to reduce customer acquisition costs, lower operational expenses, and increase worker productivity. The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical.

Is the return measurable and immediate?

Is it really?

Yes.

Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2.

A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support reps.

Translation teams laid off.

Documentation teams dramatically reduced.

Data entry teams replaced by vision models.

It's AI writing. Big words and rule of 3.

Historically, this is not how technology that improves productivity has affected the economy. I’d encourage you to learn more about economics and the history of automation.

I forgot about the rule of 3 but that's obviously AI writing

Yeah maybe the AI thought leaders will be replaced by AI

But not in the sense of singularity and explosive intelligence, but in the sense of a flaming explosive bubble of slop

That's a cool dream, but my question is: is it happening?

Out of the things you listed the only ones that seem plausible are translation team and data entry team, though even there, I'd want humans to deslop the output.

I think that is it happening is an important question, but “does the consumer actually want it to happen” should be equally important. It won’t be, because the c suite will just make the decision for us all, but it ought to be.

I'm telling you of what I've either worked on or seen myself.

Just a couple days ago a scheduled a furnace repair through an AI receptionist on the phone.

Layoffs in tech support and customer service already happened last year.

Entry level sales jobs doing cold calling have been replaced all over the place.

Doing this stuff is literally my job.

Large banks have tens of thousands of call center employees and a large % of calls they handle are perfectly solvable with a good AI bot. They are working very hard to cut call center staff as quickly as possible.

People don't realize how much a call to customers service costs. Back when I was at MSFT, a call to tech support for our product costs $20 to have someone pick up the phone. Since we were selling low margin HW, a single call to tech support completely erased the profit from that product's sale.

Layoffs have already happened and they will continue to happen.

One can argue this is a positive, as a customer if I can push a few buttons and issue a voice command to an AI to fix my problem instead of waiting on hold, that is a net positive. Also the price of goods will drop since the expected cost of customer service factored into the product price will drop.

E.g. $30 / support call, 1 in 10 customers call support during the lifetime of a product, $3 saved, but the way costs are structured, $3 saved in manufacturing can end up as nearly $10 off the final retail price of a product.

(And in competitive markets prices do drop when cost savings are found!)

If done properly you shouldn't be able to tell. A really good voice AI assistant is indistinguishable from front line support reading through a script, and potentially a few steps better.

AI didn't replace those jobs, it was just the excuse to stop offering the service.

You are not capable of telling the difference between human translated and AI translated communication.

And yet, whenever I pick up the phone I do so because I need to do something I cannot do on the website.

The chatbot, acting as my agent, whether on the website on on a call doesn't have more permissions than I have.

"Costs $20" really means "one of those poor call center reps got paid $20, barely enough to pay rent." Once you solve the supposed problem, all those people will be on the streets.

Here's the thing I'm pushing back on:

> The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical.

It's one thing to let go some people and replace them with AI.

It's quite another to have a measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical return on that decision.

Meanwhile I can't get a hold of my landlord because they removed both their support email and online formular in favor of an AI chatbot, which means I can't get them to repair my heaters and have been without heating since thursday

They're saving pennies but at what cost?

That's not how it's mostly gone historically. People tend to find different jobs.

Source?

Those who work at call centers are already desperate for any job and have zero savings. I'm not sure where they will down even further. I guess the governments will have to pick them up at the end: give them some fictious jobs and pay the minimum out of taxes from the remaining populace who still have jobs.

This replacement has already happened. Everyone who can has long since replaced their phone support with a set of menus that end in "use the website". When you need to talk to the human you still need to talk to the human.

>One can argue this is a positive, as a customer if I can push a few buttons and issue a voice command to an AI to fix my problem instead of waiting on hold, that is a net positive.

If you could do it through the website then you would be much happier than having to argue with a chatbot. And if you can't do it through the website, there aren't going to let a robot do it on your behalf.

Source: Reality. You are probably already communicating with people who you have no idea are using AI to translate their messages.

I have used AI translation professionally for a few years, and between hundreds of people in long conversations, nobody has ever asked if the text has been translated. Before AI translators, you could write at most one message and people would notice.