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Comment by peshooo | Hacker News Reader

"If a role can be outsourced, it can be automated."

I really don't see the logic in this statement.

There isn't one. It's just not true. There is lots of creative work that is routinely outsourced and cannot be automated yet. A CEO of a startup constantly outsources tasks to people, whenever they cannot be automated easily.

That's because it is illogical. A company may outsource some of its creative inputs, like graphics design or music for a game. That does not mean that creative work can be automated.

There are different reasons for outsourcing - lack of talent in-house, lack of time etc. Cost reduction may not be the only issue, and not every "cheap" task can be automated, either.

I'm building a house right now, and I sure am excited to learn that I cab replace all these expensive subcontractors with robots!

It's based on the faulty presumption that labor outsourcing motivations are purely based on cost minimization. Obviously, this falls apart if one considers that outsourcing also occurs for specialized labor that firms prefer not to keep in-house.

A great example of this is legal. If you rewrote the title as "Lawyers are hugely expensive -- why not automate them?" it would sound patently absurd.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/technology-is-changing-the-l...

There may be more validity in this whole approach than it would appear at first glance.

I'm not saying that there isn't -- but another common fallacy you'll see is conflation of rote work automation with decision automation. Rote work automation is very doable and quite helpful, but it helps create a force multiplier for the human who is at the end of the day doing the job.

Decision automation is not easy at all -- whether for executives or for legal. There's a lot of root cause analysis, presumption unpacking, and other complex problem definition that's intrinsic to the nature of the role.

But that's a crucial distinction -- if you can't automate the decisioning, you're not necessarily going to make CEOs (or lawyers) less expensive; on the contrary, you may rather just increase the scope of what they're capable of doing (because there were all these other things they would've done had they had the resources and tools to do).

I think of that the same way I think of the "Software engineers are expensive -- why not automate them?" question. Maybe some of it can be automated, but some of it is just plain human problem solving. Not all human problems can be solved with automation. Especially if/when faulty automation is what created those problems in the first place!

I think the logic is that if you can describe what you need delivered (by the contractor) then an automated system could take the same inputs to deliver the same output.

It is not necessarily always true right now (you can't get robot building contractors just yet) but that is not to say the logic is true that the outsourced work could be automated.

Same as with this one: >> If a single role is as expensive as thousands of workers, it is surely the prime candidate for robot-induced redundancy.

There's no logic, it's just catchy sound bite that when said makes some people feel smart and forward looking.

To outsource something you have to be able to unambiguously specify requirements (otherwise costs blow up as you go back and forth). Once you’ve made it truly unambiguous, the next logical step is automation.

>otherwise costs blow up as you go back and forth

I've seen that and it's apparently a viable business decision. I don't know why - I'm not an MBA

Inability to drive internal decisions and/or CYA.

You can see it even more clearly with "consultancy." The reason consultancies can get away with using so many newly minted MBAs, is that what most of them do is just reflect back the to the company what their employees already knew, but in a form that is consumable and justifies the business case for that action.

There is some internal reason why the organization can't just make the decision, even though plenty of employees know what needs to get done. It could be weak leadership, inability to take risks, analysis paralysis, fear of unfamiliar territory, unwillingness to own the risk (CYA) and even more dysfunctional characteristics (like different teams unwilling to talk to each other). Brining in someone external can cut through much of that mess.

Not all automation is economically efficient - i.e. it's cheaper to hire outsourced janitors than building state of the art cleaning robots to automate their jobs.

> Not all automation is economically efficient - i.e. it's cheaper to hire outsourced janitors than building state of the art cleaning robots to automate their jobs.

And a trap many companies large enough to afford full time janitors don't realize: with outsourcing janitors they're relinquishing a lot of control towards the service provider and the work quality. The result more often than not is disgruntled employees waiting for days for stuff such as replacing a cracked toilet seat to be done.

This does not follow, since there are things that machines cannot yet do but that humans can. Producing new humans is one such example. It is not at all clear whether "CEO-ing" is another example.

This is ridiculous. A spec like "grow the market cap of this company by 4x in 3 years" is entirely unambiguous, where do you even start automating it.

Write trading bots with enough capital to trigger gamma squeezes?

It might be different now, but prior to ML approaches working for captchas people absolutely paid for outsourced labor to solve captchas all day. And that was an intentionally un-automatable problem.

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