Andrew Yang on ai: what the evidence says · JRE #1245
SUBJECT: AI
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
Where there are two and a half million call center workers still in the United States. Generally high school graduates that make about $14 an hour.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
The employment figure is plausible for a broad, informally defined category like 'call center workers' but could not be independently verified against a live, citable government source (BLS occupational pages returned access errors during verification), so it is treated as unconfirmed rather than corroborated. The prediction that AI would soon become indistinguishable from a human in call-center-style interactions is the more testable part of the claim. Around the time of this episode, Google's Duplex voice assistant (demoed May 2018, and by early 2019 rolling out on Pixel phones as the feature Rogan references in the same exchange) was the reference point for this impression: contemporaneous reporting confirmed the public demo used curated, scripted scenarios in which the AI did not identify itself as a machine to the humans it called, which is what generated the 'indistinguishable' impression at the time. Whether general-purpose conversational AI has since become genuinely indistinguishable from humans across typical call-center tasks remains debated rather than settled, and Yang's framing overstated how close and how general that capability was in 2019.