I think this may be neglecting the role of off-shoring which is an important (technology facilitated) part of the call center story. These are the lowest-skill, lowest-trust jobs that will be most likely to be replaced earliest by LLMs; in current configurations these employees (well, technically contractors) may be able to operate the sales website for the customer or tell them to power cycle an electronic device but they have to kick any real decision up an authority tree which then more likely ends up in a US call center.
Literally: many of these outsourced low-level jobs are simply a voice interface for the website for the elderly and others uncomfortable with working a website. LLM systems are perfect for this task. So it could be that the largest impact of LLMs on customer service roles is happening overseas.
And outsourcing these low-trust, low-skill customer service functions has been eating away customer service roles noticably in the BLS statistics since before the LLM boom started in 2022. Customer service roles have been one of the more rapidly shrinking job categories for years at this point in the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics tables from BLS.
I have a theory about the attractor states: they are in the center of the conceptual manifold.
I’ve made an embedding of GPT2 and it seems to have a priciple gradient between “narrative” and “personal” language. On one end neurons that fire in discussions using “narrative” language, or impersonal topics frequently using passive voice. I think Wikipedia anchors this end of the manifold although news articles also have this passive, formal tone. The opposite end is “personal” language like Reddit interpersonal drama stories or calls to action in sales or politics; text where the writer or reader is an active participant (and some fiction written from first person perspective). It was suggested to me today that this somewhat mirrors the “assistant axis” of personality types recently discovered by Anthropic in that recent paper (the “assistant” end consists of personalities which would engage in detached impersonal statements of fact like “Evaluator” or “Librarian” while the opposite end has more personal personae like “Ghost” or “Narcissist,” notably “Visionary” seems near the center mass in one labeled figure).
It occurred to me when looking at some points near the center that flowery biblical language or personal philosophy is basically the intersection of universal “narrative” style knowledge and the personal. The Bible is full of both narrative descriptions of historical events as well as things like lists of laws and procedures for ancient rituals but also has dramatic personal stories and makes direct appeals to the reader. The age of religious texts also suggests they have this basal quality which mixes many parts of language that gradually became distinct niches as language grew. Of course flowery text about personal philosophy on subjects like consciousness certainly is adjacent to ancient religious text and also exists at the intersection of the personal and universal.