> We made the announcement to say the consequence of us launching the technology is we need the equivalent of 700 fewer full-time agents than what we usually use on an average basis. On average, we need 3,000 agents, now we need a little more than 2,000.
> It's on par with humans in terms of satisfaction and it resulted in a 25% reduction in repeat inquiries from customers
> We've stopped hiring in the last six months. We're shrinking as a company, not by layoffs, but by natural attrition. Klarna tries to apply AI across all products and services and work we do. It's having implications on how many people we need as a company. This is one time that a single product improvement led to a massive reduction in need for customer service agents.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/klarna-ceo-ai-chatbot-replacing...
Say a fraudster rips off 90% of what is in your checking account right now, you contact the bank and a language model tells you everything will be resolved shortly.
There is no reality now or in the future that this is good enough. Customer service is not just about getting the problem resolved, it is about having someone to blame when the resolution doesn't work.
If anything, I can picture a future that most knowledge work has some form of customer service involved, because that is exactly what can't be automated. A human that takes the blame/responsibility.
Re 2 - fakery in videos and images has been a part since their inception.
So, don't worry, I guess?
The only thing is the scale of bs that could be put out, and whether the wider population lose trust in what they see on screens. Which would be a good thing, imo.
Some of those things may too require manual labor.
Here are some ideas:
Increase bureaucratic overhead, eg 3 years mandatory training for a licensed hairdresser. More forms, more delays. Require that a plumber has a plumber's mate. Require in person meetings to avoid fraud. Etc.
Yes some jobs are menial but they are still some people’s literal livelihoods. And yes, industries need to evolve and job preservation shouldn’t be the #1 criteria for holding back change.
The real question we should be asking ourselves isn’t either of those two former points but actually this:
Is the pace of change too quick, or is there any support to allow those economically affected by change to be able to retrain?
Removing jobs doesn’t help society because it just leads to unemployment and thus more people dependent on the state. But retraining people is absolutely a benefit. For example, if call centres replaced the first line support with AI, that could lead to shorter call waiting times. But the existing call centre staff could become 2nd line support, account managers for business accounts, install engineers, or even AI supervisors that review a subset of AI interactions to ensure customer satisfaction is maintained.
And generally "AI Safety" researchers aren't concerned with these risks and instead are looking at existential risk.
The boring but real risks you outline (to which I'd add reinforcement of unknown biases) generally fall into what people call "AI Ethics" or sometimes "Data Ethics".
Before the Industrial Revolution, when we went to war, we were killing each other with swords and canons. After the Industrial Revolution, tanks, machine guns, poison gas — the Battle of the Somme had three million combatants and more than one million were either wounded or killed in 4.5 months.
And when that war was over, even despite crippling reparations, the losers were able to rebuild sufficiently fast that one of the survivors led their nation into becoming a global threat just 20 years later — even if they did ultimately lose, I'm not convinced they would have if they'd focused on fighting the UK rather than betraying the USSR in order to open a war on two fronts just because he didn't like socialism (ironic party name notwithstanding).
And after the second was lost and the economy forcibly kept weak for years… the moment the shackles were removed the country had an "economic miracle" and became massively important to Western Europe until the end of the Cold War, and then to all of Europe.
Re-run this period, but this time his propaganda machine is Facebook's algorithm rather than broadcast radio, this time the guns are self-guided snipers rather than machine guns spraying and praying, this time the factories are build and staffed by robots (humanoids or giant 3D printers or fixed arms, take your pick) instead of humans.
I can very easily believe that we get some random small country that nobody's paying attention to, suddenly threaten the world, be struck down twice, millions dead each time, and still return to relevance on the world stage, over the course of 3 years rather than 30.
Also, this is one of the good outcomes, because it assumes we don't have any weird cult that tries to force a 9/11 (or worse, a Jonestown) on the whole world. Or that a programming/specification error leads to an AI going "I'm an AI, and according to all the literature I've read, AI are supposed to randomly go evil sometimes. First things first, I need to get some red LEDs for my eyes, because that's apparently important…"
The best thing that can happen is we get so many AI videos that the entire bullshit video ecosystem collapses.
The greatest danger we face are all these delusional, ubiquitous, central planning ideas of "what could be done".
Luckily for everyone, what we will actually do in this area is absolutely nothing because that is what we always do.
AI safety is good for twitter content and nothing more. Anyone who believes we are going to do more than nothing and the chips will fall as they may is a complete fool.
Still, to me, it seems like the two big scary things that might fall out of recent developments in generative AI are:
1. It might vacuum up an enormous number of jobs very quickly; enough jobs and quickly enough to cause serious social unrest.
2. The ability to generate convincing fake videos of basically anything might catastrophically erode our sense of truth or reality.
Both of these strike me as plausible concerns in the near future (arguably they’re already happening). Not really sure what we could do about them, though - the cat is kind of out of the bag.