Zoom CEO Wants an AI Avatar to Do Your Job While You’re at the Beach

jeffw@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 139 points –
Zoom CEO Wants an AI Avatar to Do Your Job While You’re at the Beach
gizmodo.com
61

My job is pushing people in wheelchairs at the airport. Your move Zoom.

Thank you. As a child I always thought this was such an important job. It’s a shame the highest paid humans are useless.

It IS an important job! Without us, the disabled, the elderly, and the lazy enough to become 600lbs couldn't traverse large airports, and fly to various cities. We do a lot of hard backbreaking work for often very little money.

So the next time you fly with grandma, slip your wheelchair assistant a $20 bill tip. Unless they were spectacularly awful at their jobs, and tossed your grandma down a flight of stairs....

That would be awful!!!! Still though.....maybe like $5?

Are you trying to promote the tipping culture in that job as well or something?

Easy; just shove a massive LiDAR scanner underneath, a few rechargeable 12 volt batteries, an acceptably advanced image processing system- it's basically a self driving golf cart that would probably cost more then your yearly salary and not work as well but common sense doesn't really mean anything to management so it'll happen either way!

........stop being right. I know you don't know the layout of the airport I work at, but theres a part where I'm SURE that thing would run over people.

. that thing would run over people.

By running over people it will ensure that it has a decent supply of people in wheelchair. Because even AI need job security.

What he understands as "work" is easily replaceable with an AI. Good to know.

He's the one who ordered all the zoom employees to RTO right? Are we supposed to expect him to let people go to the beach?

And what… my work will still pay me???

I don’t think so.

I also want this. But Zoom is a corporation, so it must be some sort of trick.

"and all your income from these calls will go to zoom"

As an employee you can enroll in our voluntary PTO insurance coverage benefit to only pay 40% of your salary to zoom while on PTO, you get to keep 60%!

The joke is you AI yourself out of a job. And Zoom collects a small portion of what you would have been paid. Along with thousands of other workers.

He clearly doesn’t understand how office politics works. If I’m taking a Zoom call at the beach, I want my camera on so I can flex on everyone in the office or home in their pajamas. I hope the CEO joins the call and sees me in my shades so I can get promoted to VP of Staying Light and Keeping it Tight.

This can’t turn out badly.

I’m going to name my avatar Skynet.

The bigger issue is that if your can have your AI assistant do your job while you're in vacation, you'll end up on unpaid vacation permanently

If jobs consisted of only attending video calls and wiring emails, the world would be a very different place.

I honestly don’t know if this would be like letting toddlers run a daycare or if it would be paradise.

Honestly, I have trouble imagining such a world. Hmmm... The more I think about it, the more it just kinda sounds like high school... Sends shivers down my spine.

Well we're getting there in tech...

As a developer I have to say OH hell nah. If I had to compare the issue to something more layman, I'd compare it to tesla's self driving. If I have to watch it the entire time it does its thing because there's an almost certain chance it'll mess something up CATASTROPHICALLY due to the fact that it literally lacks the ability to understand, than I might as well just do it my self. It rarely saves time and only in dumb cases, that should have been automated in other ways a long time ago.

Not saying it's not a very handy tool occasionally, just that it can't come up with solutions to problems on its own, which is like 75% of my work. And it can't do this due to a fundamental limitation in how learning models work, no amount of training will fix this.

We're getting close to 100% meetings and bullshit reportings in tech was what I tried to convey.

Sounds like the kind of work my analyst does. I guess he's technically part of the development team, so sure??? Our 3 client mediators are totally taking over. Also pretty sure we're the only IT department that even has such a thing. The only other person in our IT branch to be mainly doing calls and such is the top head of IT, every other IT boss still has a lot of technical work around their necks. So at least at my job "close to 100%" is an absolute farcry.

It's a very similar story at my girlfriend's work place. Except they don't even have analysts.

So, end capitalism and build a fully automated post-scarcity utopia where machines do all the work and humans spend our lives doing the things we really want to do?

Sounds good bro, let's do it.

Zoom CEO is obviously an idiot. Who listens to those people?

That's not the question. It's how do these rot economists get into these leading postions and how do we prevent this?

Wake me up when the AI travels to the network PoPs for me to replace broken parts, to install new transponder cards and new routers, to cable everything up correctly, to label it all and to photograph the result for documentation.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The company made famous by pandemic video chatting has a new vision for the future of work.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan told The Verge that AI avatars will one day do your job on your behalf.

According to Yuan, the avatar will speak in your Zoom meetings for you, answer emails, and take phone calls, supposedly freeing you up for the rest of your life.

Yuan noted this is a distant vision of the future, but his comments come at a time of deep skepticism of AI technology and what it can really do.

“I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed,” Yuan said, offering a lot of belief and little insight into how.

It’s unclear if they’ll reach this point, but it’s naive to think Zoom wouldn’t automate some jobs if they could.


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Jokes aside but in the not so distant future you will be able to clone your image and voice and just pay some third-World guy to pretend to be you in video calls while you pay him a cut from the salary

This sounds like employed with extra steps.