Comment by blobdole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blobdole | Hacker News Reader

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Mostly this leaves me concerned about an escalating war between companies intentionally introducing friction into their customer service pipelines to discourage expensive customer behavior, and customers increasingly relying on more and more AI automation to deal with that friction.

In a perfect world this would cause the intentional friction to be less and less effective, while laws and regulations stop the companies from implementing more and more aggressive policies/systems, leading them to go back to the fastest possible pipeline to capture those savings if nothing else.

But I am worried that is not the world we live in and I am going to try to return some shoes I bought in the wrong size and be asked to do some integrals before I am allowed to.

Agreed. The problem is we are already there. This is a similar theme to the front page story today about malicious code and Google’s automated response

As you look at everyone’s healthcare, we have every provider adopting an agentic billing solution and every payor adopting an agentic dispute solution. Two AIs fighting over their $200 payment while my deductible is $5k

Mostly they'll just add to their prices to cover the cost. Ultimately even if AI armchair lawyering is very bad companies are going to find it easier to eat the cost of more $12 refunds than dealing with inbox spam from AIs even more relentless than the vexatious humans they generally pay to go away

(yes, they can and do use AI to handle some of that themselves, but they need some humans in the loop at some point to ensure they don't get prompt hacked into offering much more significant compensation or to confirm that the legal threats issued by Claude are indeed not applicable, or to get mobs of angry agents to leave their executives alone on LinkedIn)

Laws would not fix the root cause, which is: world became too globalized, and that brought an onslaught of bad actors. Unless some sort of social score system is introduced, it will be very hard to make a quick decision whether someone makes a claim in good faith. But then everybody loses their privacy and ultimately their agency, which arguably many of us already lost to google and facebook. I don't think there is a simple soilution.

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