Headline, January 04 2024/ A.I. : ''' ROLL THE ROCK '''

A.I. : 

''' ROLL THE ROCK '''

ROLAND HALL HAS BEEN TRANSLATING board games and marketing material from French to English for 27 years. He recalls that even in the 1990s software was used to render specific words from one language to another.

Today the tools are more advanced, meaning the types of job available have split in two. One type includes texts where fluency is less important.

An example might be a several-thousand-page manual for an aircraft, says Mr. Hall, where readers simply need to know ''what part to look for'' and '' do you turn it left or right''. The other type includes literary translations, where the finest details matter.

The first type has been most affected by Artificial Intelligence. Many workers now edit translations that have gone through a machine similar to that underlying Google's translation service.

They are paid at a steep discount per word, but more work is available. Lucia Ratikova, a Slovakian who specialises in construction and legal translations, reckons that such work now makes up more than half of listings on job sites, up from a tenth a few years ago.

A larger pool of businesses, many eager to expand into global markets, are taking advantage of the drop in price.

The machines are able to do what humans do more cheaply, employers will turn to computers, But as prices fall, overall demand for a service may rise, and possibly be enough to offset the increased use of machines.

There is no law to determine which effect will dominate. So far in America the number of translators has grown, yet their real wages have fallen slightly - probably because the profession now requires less skill.

Customer service offers more difficult terrain for A.I. Firms have been trying to automate it for years.  Thus far they have mostly just annoyed customers. Who doesn't try to game the chatbot in order to speak to an actual human?

The American Customer Satisfaction Index has been falling since 2018, and workers also appear fed up. Turnover in American ''contact centres'' hit a record high of 38% last year.

But there may be consolation : the workforce is becoming more welcoming to the low-skilled. Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford, as well as Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond of MIT, studied the roll-out of an AI assistant to more than 5,000 customers-support agents earlier this year.

The assistant offered real-time suggestions to workers. This lifted the productivity of the least skilled agents by 35%, while the most skilled ones saw little change.

It would be reasonable to assume that an impact on salespeople would be fairly similar to the one on customer-service workers. But that is not the case.

Marc Bernstein of Balto, a firm that creates AI software for both sales teams and call centres, notes that  ''style points'' [ ie, charisma and the ability to develop a relationship ] matter much more in sales than in customer service, where the important thing is getting the right answer quickly.

AI might even create sales superstars. Skylar Werneth has been in the industry for eight years and is now at Nooks, a startup that automates sales.

Software analysis his calls, identifying which tactics work best. It also helps him call many people at once. Most customers do not pick up, dialling in parallel ensures Mr. Werneth is talking more and listening to dial-tones less.

He reckons the tools Nooks offers makes him three time more productive, earning him a solid amount more than before.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on AI and Jobs, continues. The World Students Society thanks The Economist.

With respectful dedication to the Economists, Planners, Global Founder Framers of !WOW! and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. 

See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

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