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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

I don't need to conduct 1000 transactions per day. I don't forsee a world in which it will be some sort of fatal inconvenience to need to approve all purchases. I certainly don't plan on ever just handing over my credit card to an LLM, due to its fundamental architectural issues with injection, and I still don't anticipate handing it over to any future AI architecture anytime soon because I struggle to imagine what benefits could possibly be worth the risk of taking down such a basic, cheap barrier.

All that stuff about support, though, inevitable.

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Agreed. My only real complaint with this article is it frames needing to argue with a machine as though this is a new, freshly annoying thing. I already do this constantly.

Every time I call the Costco pharmacy, I just hit 0 immediately because: Phone. Trees. Suck. They have always sucked, it's just an awful, grindingly slow way to accomplish ANYTHING, and it's so, so much easier to, when I need help, get a person on the line who can figure out what's gone wrong and sort it.

The only people benefiting from cutting that down are the scum class (combo of shareholders and executives) and who's shocked, really. Everything is being ruined nearly at all times to benefit the scum class.

At least phone trees are deterministic and there's still (usually) an option to get to a person for matters that aren't covered by the multiple choice options. Talking to AI is a much worse experience and the hope of the industry is that there won't need to be a human as a fallback anymore because (they believe) the AI is intelligent enough to handle anything.

I'm surprised to find so many people who consider human-based customer support a good experience. I wasted an hour on the phone last month with a series of polite support agents who I'm sure were wonderful people in their personal lives. They kept saying they'd like to try one more thing, making me wait 5 minutes (just short enough that I can't get anything done in the interim!), and then asking for one more pointless permutation of the workflow that did not work because their website was not showing me a button the support scripts said should be there. Talking to an LLM would have let me realize a lot faster that we weren't getting anywhere.

there are many human customer support systems where the goal is to frustrate you into saying something to make them hang up, or make you give up.

good, human customer service is a big margin my current company eats our competitors alive on

> because their website was not showing me a button the support scripts said should be there.

At that point, it's effectively a phone tree executed by a human. Colloquially, human-based support means getting a hold of someone who knows how to solve problems, and worst case, knowing who to contact to solve the problem. That means employees who know their worth which unfortunately, businesses do not want to pay.

This happened to me when I tried to buy Oakley’s, it was because I’d changed my router to an ad blocking DNS which made their support session lookups fail, so they couldn’t help me. Transactions failing, all because of their site being too tightly integrated into tracking and ad platforms. I ended up going with Zenni and got similar glasses for 1/5 the price.

The very very very lovely executives at Intuit (thank you for your contribution to society boize) have a good plan for calling their TurboTax help line: you don't spell your name to the robot, you don't talk to a human.

(unless saying "no" / "agent" etc. the fifteen time would've been the trick! Sure, my name can be "O K"...

(I would def love this system if I worked there though, just surprising it didn't have an offramp along the way... maybe they did but everyone used it)

you're part of the scum class btw (we all hold shares)

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