[newaccount74]

> AI could already do their jobs better than them

If AI could already do jobs better than a human, then people would just use AIs instead of hiring people. It looks like we are getting there, slowly, but right now there are very few jobs that could be done by AIs.

I can't think of a single person that I know that has a job that could be replaced by an AI today.

[nicolas_t]

One of the problems I've seen is that often enough AIs do a much shittier job than humans but it's seen as good enough and so jobs are axed.

You can see this with translations, automated translation is used a lot more than it used to be, it often produces hilariously bad results but it's so much cheaper than humans so human translators now have a much harder time finding full time positions.

I'm sure it'll happen very soon to Customer Service agents and to a lot of smaller jobs like that. Is an AI chatbot a good customer agent? No, not really but it's cheaper...

[mylastattempt]

I think that you've really hit the nail on it's head with the "but it's cheaper" statement.

Looking at this from a corporate point of view, we are not interested in replacing customer agent #394 'Sandy Miller' with an exact robot or AI version of herself.

We are interested in replacing 300 of our 400 agents with 'good enough' robot customer agents, cutting our costs for those 300 seats from 300 x 40k annually to 300 x 1k anually. (Pulling these numbers out of my hat to illustrate the point)

The 100 human agents who remain can handle anything the 300 robot or AI agents can't. Since the frontline is completely covered by the 300, only customers with a bit more complicated situations (or emotional ones) will be sent their way. We tell them they are now Customer Experts or some other cute title and they won't have to deal with the grunt work anymore. Corporate is happy, those 100 are happy, and the 300 Sandy Millers.. well that's for HR and our PR dept to deal with.

[alasdair_]

The hope is that the 300 Sandy Millers can find jobs at other places that simply couldn't afford to have a staff of ANY customer support agents in the past (because they needed 300 of them but couldn't pay, so they opted for zero support) but can afford two or three if they are supplanted by AI.

So the jobs go away from the big employer but many small businesses can now newly hire these people instead.

[int_19h]

Conversely, SOTA models have actually become good enough at translation that they consistently beat the shittier human takes on it (which are unfortunately pretty common because companies seek to "optimize" when hiring humans, as well).

[sigmoid10]

If you haven't noticed, this is already happening. I've also met a ton of people in jobs that could be trivially replaced. If only for the fact that the jobs are not doing much and are already quite superfluous. We also regularly see this in recent mass layoffs across the tech industry. AI only increases the amount of these kinds of jobs that can be laid off with no damage to the company.

[acdha]

> I've also met a ton of people in jobs that could be trivially replaced

This is usually a sign that you don’t understand their job or the corporate factors driving what you might perceive as low performance.

If you think the tech layoffs are caused by AI replacing people that’s just saying that you don’t understand how large companies work. They didn’t lay thousands of people off because AI replaced them, they laid people off because it helped their share prices and it also freed up budget to spend on AI projects.