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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Getting LLM's to do banal customer service jobs without adding new and Kafkaesque confusion will wait on the Zermelo–Fraenkel of gas meters. Who will create it? Perhaps the newly unemployed pure mathematicians will be hired to create rigorous formalizations of daily life.

I guess the theory is pretty much this! People will figure out how to automate the production of good training data from company files and ever increasing quantities of video, audio and chat logs. Then in x years, the ai will have learned how to problem solve edge cases like yours from precedent.

It seems inconceivable that all service companies will be able to do things well enough via their existing humans plus the unemployed mathematicians to train ai to be actually competent though. More likely the ai will end up being trained to emulate all the bad traits of service desks as well as the good, and the mathematicians will discover themselves brought low by bureaucracy like the rest of us.

Especially because the company's most pressing incentive is to get some form of ai talking users in circles for an hour to use up time before a competent person becomes available.