Yesterday I needed to make a couple tech support calls. Over the past year or so I’ve been amazed at how excellent in general the level of support has been when conducting customer service/tech support calls and chat sessions.
I am guessing that we are right now in the golden age of call/chat center tech support which is staffed by human beings. The technology and methods used in call centers has really advanced to a point that it can be very easy and fast to get support.
But, in making the last couple calls yesterday, I became aware of how many of the issues I needed help with and questions I asked could have been things that an AI system would have been able to handle. Mostly what the staff at the call center is doing is comprehending keywords in your queries to them and responding based on information in front of them.
When speaking with people in call and chat centers there is an optimal way of conducting the conversation so as to minimize any difficulty and make things as easy as possible for the support system. If you do this, you will be amazed at how fast, accurate, and detailed their responses can be.
But it is now clear that this is something that in the not too distant future will more than likely be handled by AI systems. In thinking about this, I think that I will actually miss the way it is now. I actually think its kind of cool that you can call a support number or start a chat session and instantly be having a conversation with a person in the Philippines, or India, or somewhere in Eastern Europe.
I’m going to miss their voices, their friendliness, their interesting demeanors, and linguistic nuances when calling for support. I’m sure that AI systems will not be nearly as interesting to speak to as real people. So I guess I can say: Enjoy it now, the golden age of live human call and chat center support, because it probably won’t last that much longer!
I also can envision the arising of something that is new in terms of profession: that of trainors. Yes I deliberately spelled that with an o instead of an e. What is a trainor? It is a very special category of person who provides the template, the model for AI systems to be trained. A trainor is a person who the AI system will learn from. The difference between a trainor and a regular tech support staff is that they will have an ability to influence how the AI system develops its model.
I think this is cool because it can transcend into something like an art. Just as there are different meta-levels that can exist in ways people think and in processes in which they can communicate, a really good trainor will be someone who can enable AI systems to evolve to high levels of meta-processing.
It would actually be a cool concept for a sci-fi novel – some guy who is a high-level trainor for a big company. Maybe his level of skill enables him to connect with some secret AI system which has evolved to a very high level, but there is something that has gone wrong and only he knows how to fix it. Or maybe at some point he realizes at some point that the all reality is based on him, that the universe was programmed based on his template. Maybe it can be called “The Primogenitor”
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