[mullingitover]

> customer-service employees who enjoy building relationships but are increasingly expected to supervise AI agents instead.

It sucks for the employees, otoh it might be the only way we're going to beat Baumol's Cost Disease.

In the past few decades productivity has exploded, but service employees have largely failed to increase productivity in any way because it's harder to automate these tasks.

It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially.

We may have to trade the personal fulfillment in these jobs for the broader affordable access to these services.

[haritha-j]

Education and healthcare are both ridiculously overpriced in the US for reasons that have little to do with service costs. Questionable financial systems behind these services are much more to blame.

[curuinor]

finance is a service.

[latentsea]

>It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially.

You might wanna think again on that line of reasoning, because plenty of other countries have the same dynamics with respect to service employees, but they don't suffer the very US-only problem of ridiculous education and healthcare costs where calling an ambulance can ruin someones life.

[mullingitover]

My point is simply this: a person who helps individual customers in any industry isn't much more productive today than they were fifty years ago.

That may change, and it may benefit everyone except the people who get fulfillment in their life from the one-on-one human interaction they get from people who need services.

[philwelch]

“If the government pays for it, it’s free!”

[latentsea]

Exactly. You get it.

[lenerdenator]

> It sucks for the employees, otoh it might be the only way we're going to beat Baumol's Cost Disease. In the past few decades productivity has exploded, but service employees have largely failed to increase productivity in any way because it's harder to automate these tasks. It's the reason the costs of things like education and healthcare are downright extortionate, the reason you're paying back your college well into your fifties, the reason you don't call an ambulance for someone in the US because you don't want to ruin their life financially.

Weird. I thought it was the fact that you have a cohort of people who are grossly overpaid to represent people who do none of the work yet expect an ever-increasing amount of value created by the work to be shifted to them every 90 days, no matter what, forever.

> We may have to trade the personal fulfillment in these jobs for the broader affordable access to these services.

Then you'll run into two problems:

1) no one will want to do necessary jobs without increased compensation, which is at the root of your analysis of "Baumol's Cost Disease"

2) at least in the US, you'll have a bunch of increasingly miserable people living in a society that gives them less and less to lose while increasing the availability of things that allow them to take out their frustrations upon themselves (substances) or others (weapons)

[hoppyhoppy2]

As a former first responder, I'm interested in hearing more about how AI-powered ambulance services would work. (related question: will the 911 dispatchers be AI?)

[mullingitover]

I don't think first responders are ever going to be at risk.

Administrators, on the other hand, are a massive part of the costs in the health sector (IIRC the Obama administration chickened out on truly reforming healthcare exactly because the number of administrators that would be made redundant would tank the economy). A significant amount of administrative work can be automated.

[wang_li]

As a person who drives on a daily basis, I want to know why we don't have AI controlled stop lights and overall traffic control.