Your main issue is assuming the best of technology and the corporations intending to implement LLMs to remove people from payroll. You can attempt to condescend as part of the argument if you wish, but the reality is quite clear to most. Easy quick one, let's use todays FT as a small example
If this is the type of the behaviour exhibited on a day to day basis- I'm sure we could find examples of this every day for the last 50 years- then the idea that an LLM will be implemented under the same mentality on an altruistic basis is quite naive really
Oh I definitely agree that the market forces driving these things are not altruistic - got to learn that firsthand in blockchain, where the forces driving the public goods applications are quite small compared to the venture capital forces driving the financial/speculative applications.
HuggingFace, or more broadly some subset of the open-source AI developer community, seems like an analogous example here to the public goods crowd I'm referencing, where the bulk of the funding in the industry is (presumably) going to proprietary models which will be deployed to profit-maximizing ends, whereas any altruistic applications would need to be fueled by philanthropic funding and/or free time of open-source developers.
Re: customer service, I'm not familiar enough with the industrial landscape of AI to know who is working on this, but I'd imagine that particular application is already seeing instances of this, and I'd imagine the right handling of it would be a smoother user experience than the multi-choice voice options where you need to say the exact phrase listed in the options.
Would an LLM be a smoother user experience than an actual human representative? I'd say that depends on a lot of things, such as the sophistication of the model, the tendency for human representatives to get jaded/frustrated with customers, etc.
That said, if companies start to find that LLMs do outperform human representatives in this customer support role, I'd imagine best practices would shift accordingly - not because companies care about customer experience for altruistic reasons, but because they care about customer experience for profit-maximizing reasons.