Got schooled by a retired engineer about my chatbot idea at a coffee shop

I was at this little coffee place in Portland like 6 months ago, sketching out a plan for an AI customer service bot. This older guy next to me saw my notes and goes, 'You know who's gonna clean up your mess when it screws up? A human making minimum wage.' He spent 20 minutes walking me through how his old team had to fix automated systems that didn't have fail-safes. It stuck with me because I never considered the people stuck fixing the bot's mistakes. Has anyone else had a random conversation that totally shifted how you think about building AI?

3 comments

3 Comments

beth2767d ago

The bit about "who's gonna clean up your mess" hits hard. I had a similar thing at a grocery store last year. A cashier told me her store's self-checkout AI kept screwing up produce weights and she had to override it like 50 times a shift. She said the company never once asked the cashiers what was wrong before rolling it out. Made me realize the people who actually deal with the bot's brain farts are treated like they don't matter.

the_hayden7d ago

Oh come on, it's not that big of a deal. Grocery stores have always had issues with produce scales and weight discrepancies, long before any AI was involved. Those cashiers were probably overriding stuff just as much with the old systems, it just took a few extra button presses. I've used self-checkout plenty of times and the only real annoyance is when it doesn't recognize a bag, but that's a 10 second fix at most.

bennett.harper7d ago

Exactly this. I just unplug the scale and plug it back in when it bugs out, resets the weight sensor, works like half the time. That and keep your receipt, if it double charges you just take it to customer service, theyre way more likely to fix it if you already paid and caught the error.