[shartshooter]

“AI coming for white collar jobs” is a sexy claim, but it’s got some truth to it.

Using your examples of call centers, back office and fraud detection as examples: - what happens when five humans can do the work of seven, because there is less shuffling paper and more automation in the call center?

Companies will staff for those five people, two folks will be out on their can.

The economy may or may not make more jobs to replace them, though we hope they do, there is no guarantee that that back office person will find similar employment. Over time, more and more of what is done will be automated away. Death by a thousand cuts.

On the other hand, this idea is in the collective zeitgeist. Its the duty of respectable newspapers to share stories that are on people’s minds. People on the margins always have concerns about losing their job, or affording rent next month. This feels like a worthwhile article to me

[rabbits77]

the point was that largely those two of the seven you mentioned are already long gone. the five remaining are probably fine.

those unfortunate two lost their jobs 10 years ago to existing automation and process improvements.

call centers, it could be noted, are already ahead of the curve in terms of cost pressures on a business: human wages in India and the Philippines will not grow faster than what an AI company will want to charge to validate their absurd ($100 billion? $3 trillion?) valuation.

yeah, it’s cynical sounding, but the truth is that exploiting humans will continue to be cheaper than paying for humanless tech for a lot of these supposed AI use cases.

AI also needs to compete with the previous decades’ main cost cutting measure of offshore business process outsourcing.