If you're time-poor maybe you're not as rich as you think.
The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.
If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.
I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.
It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool.
It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).
The smartest people in academia get promoted to positions that used to come with administrative staff.
Now they’re expected to do all of that with a computer, which is easy right?
So now they spend 30% or more of their time administrationating their position, rather than delegating those duties to their admin staff.
That’s less time teaching and innovating.
Meanwhile, the increase in administration costs of learning institutions has massively outpaced all other costs as a fraction of total.
Guys this isn’t an optional position. You don’t want your SWEs doing product work. They are not going to do a good job of it when they also need to, you know, do their actual job.
Is it cheaper now that you can swear at flight booking software yourself, and scream at the hotel when they cancel your rooms that you got from a third party site that went through some other intermediary that bought the rooms at a group rate they shouldn't have been allowed to buy it at? Sure, it's cheaper. Is it better? Well, they want you to believe that. You have unlimited choice now. Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!
And you can enjoy all the risk and liability for mistakes made along the way, too, which is where the actual optimization happened in the economy.
Now that you do it yourself if you mis scan organic tomatoes as regular tomatoes you are freaking going to jail.
Ok exaggerating a bit, but having shoplifting in your record can be life changing, specially for immigrants
No such privilege is granted to regular customers. Instead, the self-checkout station locks itself up, and the customer has to wait several minutes for the assigned employee (who, most of the time, is also working two other tasks at the store) to show up, analyze the situation, enter service mode, and do the undo steps.
It's a classic false-positive problem. Most times when the self-checkout clerk has to give you attention, the problem is stupidly innocuous, so they blindly approve, as they have been trained by the system that it isn't a real problem.
I'm sure plenty of things get by them this way.
My experience is that the assigned employee is always looking for something to do, because he can't leave the self-checkout area, but there isn't anything to actually do there. And well, the store better not accuse honest customers of anything, or else some stuff they really won't like will happen (and that applies to poor customers too).
Anyway, the experience is still so bad that I tend not to use it. But that's because the machines really suck.
I greatly prefer the single queue in self checkouts rather than betting on which cash register line will get stuck on someone that has a pricing issue or something. Obviously, this has nothing to do with self checkouts, but I find single queues far more ubiquitous after self checkouts came around than before.
For lots of stuff, a cashier is probably quicker. But I almost never have lots of stuff.
If this happens, it’s a problem with the judicial system, not self checkouts. I highly doubt it has ever happened, though.
And you can enjoy overpaying for a lower quality vacation if your travel agent is unscrupulous and getting kickbacks from vendors.
That is the actual optimization that happened, I can do more research and communicate directly with vendors.
Those that don’t want to are still free to pay extra for a travel agent.
Only if your time is worthless.
Doing it yourself? Good luck! Hope you've got good service on your phone where ever you happen to be when things go wrong.
90% of travel is probably happening where mobile networks are available. Also, since most travel seems to happen without travel agents today, it appears that "luck" is not that necessary, otherwise people wouldn't be choosing to forego travel agents.
Travel agents were not outlawed. Most people just prefer to save money and do the work themselves (for most trips) rather than pay a travel agent.
Yes, but they're already one level up, so they can fix the problems in their company's immediate system, and then unlike the customer, they're a trusted party in the network of all other parties, so they can mail/call other parties directly and get people there to fix issues without too much delay.
Also the original saying used rich people but I think it better pertains to busy people in general.