A former Tesla executive says one type of job could be among the first to face large-scale AI automation as systems become more capable of handling repetitive digital tasks.
In a new interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Andrej Karpathy, who previously led AI development at Tesla and OpenAI, says current machine learning systems are well-suited for tightly scoped, routine work.
At the current stage of development, Karpathy says AI can now take over the jobs of call center employees.
“As an example, call center employees often come up, and I think rightly so, because call center employees have a number of simplifying properties with respect to what’s automatable today. Their jobs are pretty simple. It’s a sequence of tasks and every task looks similar…
And so it’s more closed, it’s more understandable, and it’s purely digital. So I would be looking for those things.”
But while Karpathy thinks that AI can now replace call center workers, he says the tech still requires humans in the loop.
“But even there, I’m not actually looking at full automation yet. I’m looking for an autonomy slider. And I almost expect that we are not going to instantly replace people, we’re going to be swapping in AIs that do 80% of the volume. They delegate 20% of the volume to humans, and humans are supervising teams of five AIs doing the call center work that’s more rote.”
Karpathy also believes that companies may lay off workers now only to hire them back a couple of years down the road, noting that AI is not yet perfect.
“Maybe some of the things I would also expect is maybe they are swapping in AI, but then I would still wait for a year or two, because I would potentially expect them to pull back and actually rehire some of the people.”
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