‘Your Biggest Nightmare’
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Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, testified before a Senate subcommittee in May. In recent months, OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot has made its way into courtrooms.Credit...Win McNamee/Getty Images
This spring, lawmakers in Washington hauled forward the makers of A.I. tools to begin discussing the risks posed by the products they’ve unleashed.
“Let me ask you what your biggest nightmare is,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asked OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, after sharing that his own greatest fear was job loss.
“There will be an impact on jobs,” said Mr. Altman, whose company developed ChatGPT.
That reality has already become clear. The British telecommunications company BT Group announced in May that it would cut up to 55,000 jobs by 2030 as it increasingly relied on A.I. The chief executive of IBM said A.I. would affect certain clerical jobs in the company, eliminating the need for up to 30 percent of some roles, while creating new ones.
AT&T has begun integrating A.I. into many parts of its customer service work, including routing customers to agents, offering suggestions for technical solutions during customer calls and producing transcripts.
The company said all of these uses were intended to create a better experience for customers and workers. “We’re really trying to focus on using A.I. to augment and assist our employees,” said Nicole Rafferty, who leads AT&T’s customer care operation and works with staff members nationwide.
“We’re always going to need in-person engagement to solve those complex customer situations,” Ms. Rafferty added. “That’s why we’re so focused on building A.I. that supports our employees.”
Economists studying A.I. have argued that it most likely won’t prompt sudden widespread layoffs. Instead, it could gradually eliminate the need for humans to do certain tasks — and make the remaining work more challenging.
“The tasks left to call center workers are the most complex ones, and customers are frustrated,” said Virginia Doellgast, a professor at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell.
Ms. Sherrod has always enjoyed getting to know her customers. She said she took about 20 calls a day, from 9:30 to 6:30. While she’s resolving technical issues, she listens to why people are calling in, and she hears from customers who just bought new homes, were married or lost family members.
“It’s sort of like you’re a therapist,” she said. “They tell you their life stories.”
She is already finding her job growing more challenging with A.I. The automated technology has a hard time understanding Ms. Sherrod’s drawl, she said, so the transcripts from her calls are full of mistakes. Once the technology is no longer in a pilot phase, she won’t be able to make corrections. (AT&T said it was refining the A.I. products it used to prevent these kinds of errors.)
It seems likely, to Ms. Sherrod, that at some point as the work gets more efficient, the company won’t need quite as many humans answering calls in its centers.
Ms. Sherrod wonders, too: Doesn’t the company trust her? For two consecutive years, she won AT&T’s Summit Award, placing her in the top 3 percent of the company’s customer service representatives nationally. Her name was projected on the call center’s wall.
“They gave everyone a little gift bag with a trophy,” Ms. Sherrod recalled. “That meant a lot to me.”
‘Look at My Life’
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Ms. Sherrod at the Communications Workers of America’s regional labor union office where she is a vice president.Credit...Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times
As companies like AT&T embrace A.I., experts are floating proposals meant to protect workers. There’s the possibility of training programs helping people make the transition to new jobs, or a displacement tax levied on employers when a worker’s job is automated but the person is not retrained.
Labor unions are wading into these battles. In Hollywood, the unions representing actors and television writers have fought to limit the use of A.I. in script writing and production.
Just 6 percent of the country’s private-sector workers are represented by unions. Ms. Sherrod is one, and she has begun fighting her company for more information about its A.I. plans, sitting in her union hall nine miles from the call center, where she works under a Norman Rockwell painting of a wireline technician.
For years, Ms. Sherrod’s demands on behalf of the union have been rote. As a steward, she typically asked the company to reduce penalties for colleagues who got in trouble.
But for the first time, this summer, she feels that she is taking up an issue that will affect workers beyond AT&T. She recently asked her union to establish a task force focused on A.I.
In late May, Ms. Sherrod was invited by the Communications Workers of America to travel to Washington, where she and dozens of other workers met with the White House’s Office of Public Engagement to share their experience with A.I.
A warehouse worker described being monitored with A.I. that tracked how speedily he moved packages, creating pressure for him to skip breaks. A delivery driver said automated surveillance technologies were being used to monitor workers and look for potential disciplinary actions, even though their records weren’t reliable. Ms. Sherrod described how the A.I. in her call center created inaccurate summaries of her work.
Her son, Malik, was astonished to hear that his mother was headed to the White House. “When my dad told me about it, at first I said, ‘You’re lying,’” he said with a laugh.
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With her pay and commissions, Ms. Sherrod has been able to buy a home and give her son, Malik, the childhood she never had.Credit...Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times
Ms. Sherrod sometimes feels that her life presents an argument for a type of job that one day might no longer exist.
With her pay and commissions, she has been able to buy a home. She lives on a sunny street full of families, some of whom work in fields like nursing and accounting. She is down the road from a softball field and playground. On the weekends, her neighbors gather for cookouts. The adults eat snowballs, while the children play basketball and set up splash pads.
Ms. Sherrod takes pride in buying Malik anything he asks for. She wants to give him the childhood she never had.
“Call center work — it’s life-changing,” she said. “Look at my life. Will all that be taken away from me?”
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