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

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.

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!)

"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.

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

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.