[Jeff_Brown]

I bank with a small credit union. They have a phone robot who asks what I need help with, and so far no matter what I've said, the response has always been to think for a few seconds and then say, "I'll connect you to a representative." It's wonderful.

[WorldMaker]

The phone robot is collecting the various patterns for eventual automation. You are doing free labor for it every time by giving it any information at all and not just immediately yelling for an operator or human.

Support solidarity for human kind by refusing to talk these data gathering machines.

(I realize this sounds like satire as I write it, that I'm rather serious about this, and that it says a lot about the weird part of the timeline on which we currently exist.)

[throwuwu]

No. Automate the shit out of this. Call centre jobs should not exist. If you have humanity’s best interests in mind then you should be all in on automation instead of trying to institutionalize miserable and meaningless jobs.

[WorldMaker]

That's mostly a fair assessment.

Though I think it useful to add:

If the solution could be entirely automated it should be a self-service website somewhere. I'm all for automating away call centers as much as possible, but I think we also need to stop thinking of call centers themselves as bottom of the barrel "miserable and/or meaningless jobs". It should be the case in 2023 that if I'm resorting to calling a call center I need expertise or creative problem solving that I can't get from a self-service website. Depending on how you define Expertise some of it is sort of automatable, but Creative Problem Solving is unlikely to ever be easily/cheaply automatable, there will likely "always" be a need for call centers with real humans for these reasons, and shouldn't be considered minimum wage skills and maybe should be treated as something far better than "miserable jobs".

I don't expect today's owners of call centers to realize how much expertise and creative problem solving is invested in their labor and to adequately reflect that in their pay statements and other ways that account for how miserable or meaningless that they make those jobs feel. But it should be something to appreciate: if there's still a human doing the job, there's probably a good reason, and it would be great if we respected those people for what they are actually doing (including very human skills such as expertise and creative problem solving).

[RhodesianHunter]

That would be great if the result were that people currently in those jobs could instead pursue their passions and hobbies.

Instead we're just rapidly dividing people into those who have nothing and those who have everything.

[Jeff_Brown]

+1. People have been afraid of automation destroying jobs for centuries but in the long run the unemployment rate doesn't seem to go much of anywhere.

[pixl97]

Eh, in another year or two you'll call up and have no idea if you're talking to a human or not. Game over, we lost.

[antonvs]

We lost already when we hired humans to read scripts that made them essentially indistinguishable from machines.

[wincy]

McDonald’s has a drive thru voice assistant that also did this for the first few months. But now it catches virtually everything.

Similar to what someone else said I’d imagine they gathered the considerable voice samples from a few months of thousands of McDonald’s locations, and trained on that data.

[satellite2]

Maybe they have a hash of your voice and know you always manage to escalate to L3 so just skip the middlemen?