Plenty of high paying jobs that AI cannot "take".
All scaremongering nonsense.
The low paying grunt work like call centres might end up gone, but that's no where near happening. AI cannot function correctly to have an actual coherent conversation with a satisfactory outcome.
Especially, if the aim of the company running said call centre sets it to never allow a refund of what ever the service was offered originally.
The grunt work in major call centres had already squeezed humanity out of the equation back in 2013-14, when I had the misfortune of being desperate enough to fight my way through an assessment centre for a rare opportunity to get £6.80 ph job doing that work.
Deviate from the script, you start failing at a metric that was termed something like business service reliability. Calls taking too long, even if it's because your callers have 14 pre-existing medical conditions and various caveats regarding their coverage you need to catalogue? That's on you - you failed. Low conversion rate trying to upsell the extras? (No commision given for doing so) = just another metric that counted against you. Spent >0 secs writing useful detailed notes about the customer's call for future reference? That's you failing in your wrap time metric; you should've typed nothing after the call was concluded.
Calls were listened in to like a George Orwell dystopia, though only slowly did the phone-call-monitoring class start raising the complaint that calls were virtually unintelligible at peak times because their digital telephony over IP dropped to horrendously low bit rates. Until queries were raised by the company's eaves-dropping class, poor performance due to the line quality was your fault, and counted against your metrics.
This was more than 10 years ago during the 'recovery period' / aftermath of 2008. Anyone with the ambition of taking that call centre job to get their foot in the door for something better found out they barred from applying for 'the real jobs' internally until they'd hit all call handling targets consistently over about four years IIRC.
I'm glad the history books have been slowly re-written to describe then as the Great Recession, instead of the mere 'Credit Crunch' that we needed to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps to get through.
Considering the massive minimum wage and labour bargaining power that now seems to exist post-COVID, even with the threat of AI and the apparent decay-of-everything, I honestly fancy these times compared to post-2008, which I now look back on as being something akin to a modern day Grapes of Wrath style story.
www.tomshardware.com
