[bumby]

Are you should making those jobs more efficient is the right goal? David Graeber may have disagreed, or at least agreed that the most efficient action is to remove those jobs altogether.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

I'm not sure "doing bullshit busywork more efficiently" leads to better ends; it might just lead to more bullshit busywork.

[unoti]

A customer service agent isn't a bullshit job. They form a user interface between a complex system and a user that isn't an expert in the domain. The customer service agent understands the business domain, as well as how to apply that expertise to what the customer wants and needs. Consider the complexity of what a travel agent or airline agent does. The agent needs to understand the business domain of flight availability and pricing, as well as technical details related to the underlying systems, and have the ability to communicate bidirectionally comfortably with the customer, who knows little or none of the above. This role serves a useful purpose and doesn't really qualify as a bullshit job. But in principle, all of this could be done by a well-crafted system with OpenAI's api's (which others in these threads have said are "just chatbots").

Interfacing with people and understanding business domain knowledge is in fact something we can do with LLM's. There are countless business domains/job areas that fall into the shape I described above, enough to keep engineers busy for a real long time. There are other problem shapes that we can attack with these LLM's as well, such as deep analysis on areas where it can recommend process improvements (six sigma kinds of things). Process improvement, some might say, gets closer to the kinds of things Graeber might call bullshit jobs, though...

[bumby]

In theory, I agree that LLMs could perform those jobs.

I may just be less of a techno optimist. If history is any guide, the automation of front-line human interfaces will lead to less good customer service in the name of lowering labor cost as a means of increasing profits. That seems to make things worse for everyone except shareholders. In those cases, we’re not making the customers experience more efficient, we’re making the development of profit more efficient at the cost of customer experience.