Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It's funny, in the US when jobs get outsourced, robots get blamed.
In India, when jobs get insourced back, robots get blamed.
The key takeaway seems to be never, ever, ever blame trade policy made by a politician/lobbyist if you can shift it to robots made by an engineer.
The two have very little to do with one another. In fact, the more automateable a job is, the less likely it will be pushed offshore because managing a highly automated process means that quality control becomes much more difficult (bugs, etc.).
For instance, take the garment industry: the big gains in productivity were made a long time ago. It now takes about as many people to make a pair of jeans as it did 30 years ago. But those jeans are very easy to transport. Consequently, the industry is constantly searching the globe for the cheapest possible hour of human labor.
If the garment industry where still seeing big productivity gains then they'd have less pressure to seek low labor costs and there'd be less interest in outsourcing. If jeans went bad when packed into a container then there'd be less ability for them to outsource (goods less tradable) but tradability is orthogonal to automatability.
Not entirely. One company I worked for had an office in India where workers had 2 screens on their desks and their job was to re-key from one app into another. It was cheaper to do this than to integrate those two apps. Tho' not really because of the re-work needed due to typos, but senior management will never have realized that.
What hasn't been offshored are jobs that require a physical presence, these are much tougher to automate.
No. All of those are areas are very unamenable to automation.
* The west hasn't offshored manufacturing that it could automate. It automated it and kept it at home. The manufacturing it couldn't automate went offshore, provided the QC / lead times didn't completely fuck the product (e.g. apparel / cheap plastic toys / electronics / etc.).
* Customer service is fundamentally unautomateable since it's mostly dealing with problems (have you automated fixing bugs in your code yet? if so, maybe there's hope) and people who just want to talk to a human when they buy things. Moreover, you suffer massive quality issues when offshoring it, which is why the companies that do offshore only survive the quality hit because they don't need to be competitive. Comcast outsources its call centers; Netflix keeps them at home.
* IT support is similar - most of the time you're dealing with IT issues, dealing with people and dealing with the broken way people deal with their IT issues. Again, generic, high level problem solving that involves a great deal of human interaction is just about the last thing that will ever be automated.
Not entirely true: another reason to offshore manufacturing, if you are a certain kind of executive, is that you don't need to worry about pollution laws.
One of Henry Ford’s quotes comes to mind: anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.
I'm not sure if the reasons I stated are really responsible for this, but the requirements in job postings getting higher over the years is a hard fact you can probably check easily.
and empirical evidence is not just many anecdotal evidence.
But is it really so? Echo chambers and fake news are as old as civilization, only we used different words for them in the past. The villages in which our great^n-grandparents lived were even more of an echo chamber - all the opinions you've ever heard were the ones of a few dozen people you could communicate with. "Fake news" existed in the form of hostile gossip then. Newspapers gave us access to more information, and with it, organized fake news - and the choice of which paper you read created your echo chamber.
The real problem is, the world is just too complex for our minds to handle. It's only becoming apparent because progress of technology gives us more of the world to see.
I use IRC as my primary "social media" tool of choice, but some days, I barely look at the channels - my online life is spent in the PMs with the people I've known for years.
It only needs to save money for long enough for the executive who proposed it to get their next bonus or promotion. Then they swan off to greener pastures and leave the rest to pick up the pieces.
Sometimes the large corporations are doing mutual agreements, where they outsource $10mil of work and expect that company to then market their stuff in the region.
Quality and employee satisfaction don't show up on spreadsheets and it always seemed like upper management didn't care about that, they were focused on how much money they were saving.
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I don’t like the implication here
Humans are weak and companies are just waiting to exploit that.
Why focus on the 'fluff' who have lower incomes and will have soon have even less, when you can focus on the 'cream' with high margins, hence $1000 phones and $800 billion cash reserves with no use.
Examples ?
Since you mention 1000$phones, in tech you see more and more "premium" products, accompanied by very basic ones that are still quite funcional and dirt cheap, and everything in between.
You can buy a fully functional laptop or smartphone for 100 bucks, and I can remember times when they were both "premium only" products.
Same story, different century.
The auto made horse traders and blacksmiths redundant, automated weaving looms made weavers redundant, high yield farming made many small farmers redundant — yet worldwide poverty is lower than it has ever been, unemployment rates are fairly constant.
New industries form when others decline. Who would have thought in 1920 that there would be an entire industry centered around home recording technology or that car alarms would be a thing or that home automation installers would exist?
Everyone always thinks that their age is the pinnacle of technological achievement — only to be proven wrong within a single generation.
This clamor for UBI and sky-is-falling fear is textbook Ludditeism. Identical arguments were presented by the Luddites, yet everyone can agree that England was a pretty rotten place for normal people in the early 19th century.
Will automation lead to more populists revolts ? I don't know but we need research into more solutions (besides just basic income), the problem is too big to ignore.
It was only a matter of time before that was addressed, if only by erosion.