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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   23925 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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AI is already imploding the white collar world in other ways than just job replacement. Let me give an example.

AI BDR (business development representative) is one of the roles that most AI agent companies are rushing out because it’s (seemingly) low hanging fruit.

What is a BDR? It’s the lowest sales role that fields inbound requests and does outbound prospecting (cold calls, emails etc).

Cold calling used to be the best way to do outbound until 3 things happened: 1. Email, 2. decline of the office phone, and robo calling + smartphone with contacts making answering unknown calls a scourge.

Now phones are just broken as a concept. I never pick up unknown numbers and now miss all sorts of important calls like drs appointments etc.

So emails.. that worked for a while, but it’s been an arms race of attention against spam. In the last 6 months it’s broken completely Why? Because there was a really short period of time where AI BDR was a super power, human like messaging, custom not templates, even personalized to company / contact research at scale.

But the pipe has already been clogged and it’s ruined for everyone. A world of perfect AI, every company who can maybe sell me something can send a handcrafted message to me every single day. That’s millions of messages. No one AI can get through the other. Email and marketing on both sides of the equation is over.

There’s no quick fix. AI being good didn’t improve outbound sales for the seller or recipient (except for a short period inside 2024).

It just broke it. AI didn’t replace jobs, it didn’t increase efficiency. It clogged a channel with so much junk it collapsed.

This will happen in other places.

Now phones are just broken as a concept. I never pick up unknown numbers and now miss all sorts of important calls like drs appointments etc.

Fair warning, zoomer take here. I seriously wonder why phone numbers even still exist, and especially why they exist with barely any real security, confidentiality, and authentication requirements. Companies use them to verify identities, people call them with personal information, but the system is set up with absolutely no reliable guarantee that who you're talking to is actually the person, and not some bot, spoofed number, or sim-swapped identity thief. And we've taken things like area codes and just destroyed the whole system.

They were great -- if expensive -- I'm told, in the days of Ma Bell. But now they seem like a bolted-on addition to our telecommunications system, which is founded on the internet. And outside of the US, people don't even use SMS!

And outside of the US, people don't even use SMS!

WhatsApp and telegram still rely on your phone number. It’s just an app that sends texts by data rather than as an SMS- either because it’s cheaper($0.10/text adds up in countries that don’t have unlimited texting) or because of features offered by those apps(eg ability to create groups or whatever).

WhatsApp and telegram still rely on your phone number.

As a tracking / anti-spam measure, not because it's technically necessary.

I think AI will take most jobs, for sure. But I also think a lot more human interaction is going to have to take place in person from now on because how easy it will be to fake even HD video calls that are imperceptible very soon.

I think the 'Star Wars future' is a best possible outcome here. The internet is ruined, in person interactions is the norm and AI is a lot of ideosyncratic robots who have to talk to eachother and the internet for us because it's all so incomprehensible for an average human.

Thanks to a competency crisis in IT that's been outsourced to robots, nobody really programs anymore, but we can rely on AI/robots to do that for us. Simultaneously that also forces more things back into a more mechanical world and skillset as people spend more time interacting with their high tech environment materially rather than digitally / through pixels.

Interesting. My impression of advertising is that it was already substantially clogged, to the extent that it hardly matters if an email is personal or not, in fact a personalized message from a stranger is actually more suspicious than a normal advertisement, it's probably going to be some kind of scam.

I think my mobile phone company has some sort of spam filter, because the only unwanted calls I get are from the politicians in a jurisdiction I once registered to vote, so plausibly I opted into that.

Lately, I've found myself ignoring or marking as spam pretty much all business emails, and following them on social media instead. This is despite being the sort of person who reads blogs that are basically advertisements. I'll be annoyed when Google reviews, Amazon reviews, and Reddit posts get filled up even more with AI entries, but that was probably going to accelerate even without AI.

Yeah this narrative seems completely false from my experience. Email has been an abysmal channel for years now. Spam filters killed off much of its efficacy like a decade ago. Gmails "Promotions" tab annihilated mass market email advertising well before LLMs.

It's still active in b2b sales/account management work.

It is, helped along by Microsoft's crappy junk mail filter

I should perhaps have added that if I compare email open rates/click through/whatever now versus 2/5/10 years ago in the companies I have worked for, they're pretty much the same. No evidence for any further decline in effectiveness yet

Gmails "Promotions" tab annihilated mass market email advertising well before LLMs.

I do still get a lot of ad-type emails in my main inbox, but then, I haven't "trained" Gmail to move some types to Promotions.

A similar sort of arms race is happening in hiring. Resume -> run through LLM to fake effort ('personalize') for a billion jobs -> hiring managers run through LLMs to try to regain sanity in number of seemingly-effortful applications. It's a rather unfortunate Nash equilibrium.

Anecdotally I've seen a lot more 'have any friends that would be a decent fit for this job?' style hiring lately than I have in a long time. And I suspect that may be one of the major outcomes - more web-of-trust style communication.

This is easy to solve: just flip the script. Have the recruiters and hiring managers reach out to people. All you need is a job market clearing house, where job seekers advertise their interest, and companies make the first move. Clearing house verifies identity of job seeker, to prevent creation of multiple profiles, and charges companies a fee per contact, so that they don’t spam people indiscriminately.

This works, because this model has been very common on the tech industry. In my dozen+ of years in this industry, I only ever cold sent my resume to one company, for an intentship. I got that job, and from that point it was always recruiters reaching out to me.

There have been many many many attempts at such a clearing-house.

They all end up falling over sooner or later due to misaligned incentives. Sooner or later someone gets the "bright" idea of charging people for "premium" access. Which can kind of work for a while, until 'premium' turns into 'priority'. And sooner or later someone realizes "wait, we get more money charging month-to-month if people stay on our website instead of leaving because they got a job", and start arranging things to have near-misses as opposed to good fits.

Same cycle that happens in dating markets.

This only really work when there is an oversupply of jobs compared to "qualified" labour.

The purpose of a CV, personal letter etc. Is often more an attempt to pre-empt part of the interview process than matching credentials to job requirements (both of which often are inaccurate). The entry of AI's here makes things less like a clearinghouse because you get less useful information before the interviews.

All you need is a job market clearing house, where job seekers advertise their interest, and companies make the first move.

Does this really not exist yet?

LinkedIn. With all the associated pathologies. But you have to be established and have some skills to sell.

Maybe boomer advice will become relevant again, and we'll start having to approach potential employers in person.

For that, you'd have to break HR's stranglehold on the process. Strongly in favour of, by the way.

It just broke it. AI didn’t replace jobs, it didn’t increase efficiency. It clogged a channel with so much junk it collapsed.

This will happen in other places.

Here's one. Google image search is now littered with AI slop.

Another is google ads. There’s an apocalypse brewing here for companies that rely on adspend for inbound driven pipeline. It’s falling off a cliff

Google regular search is also littered with AI slop.

Someone said in a lower thread the internet will be the first casualty of AI and I tend to agree

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