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Comment by zht | Hacker News Reader

this is some black mirror stuff

imagine Google's general approach to customer service/moderation, but applied all over the place by companies small and large

I shudder at the thought

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I’ve found that it’s pretty much impossible to talk to a person in most customer services in the past few years, it’s always a “robot”. And this has been going since well before LLMs.

I find it easy to talk to a person. A US based person, no. A person who can resolve my problem, maybe. But a person, yes.

Yup, most companies are now simply providing “emotional” support using sufficiently apologetic, but powerless agents. That is, if you can defeat chat bot screen or IVR maze. The hope is for user to give up..

Especially with fairly systemic labor shortages, it seems inevitable that we'll see more and more self-service and automation with the corollary that getting an actual human involved will become more difficult.

Or it could be precisely the opposite -- LLM's take care of all of the easy customer service/moderation, so that it's actually affordable for Google and others to hire high-quality customer reps to manage the hard/urgent stuff that LLM's surface.

I don't know, but generally speaking with technological progress, while we lose some things we gain more things. It's important to think not just what technology gets rid of, but what it enables.

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