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Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy
- psergeant 9y ago> “conducted a quarterly review of chatbot content“ ... I don’t like the implication here
- gaius 9y agoWhere were these services when jobs were being lost in the West due to outsourcing...?
- point78 9y agoPossibly didn't exist at the time?
- misja111 9y agoThey were outsourced.
- pjschlic 9y agoIt looks like a combination of semantic analysis not being there for the automation to work at the time and maybe some regulations issues (with each state probably having their own, I imagine compliance is/was more difficult)?
- abalashov 9y agoIsn’t the more interesting story that half of India’s IT workforce is going to be structurally out of work in the near future, if this article and McKinsey are to be believed?
- nerdponx 9y agoIt sounds like there's a big shortage of competent, trained therapists, however. Not even being snarky. Therapy is like an oil change for your brain, humans seem to need it in order to function 100% over a long period of time.
- im3w1l 9y agoI think it's sad how we are getting further and further away from genuine human interaction. I guess we can't afford each other anymore.
- pax 9y agoThat's arguable. Digital platforms are both facilitating and changing human interaction - for both better and worse.
- coldtea 9y agoBut mostly, between echo chambers, fake news, cyber-bullying, shallow social media, etc, for worse.
- vertex-four 9y agoOnly if you choose the default. Lasting, meaningful friendships can be made - the trick is to ignore the "broadcast" tooling that's heavily suggested to you by entities that can only exist so long as they have an ever-increasing income - the walls, the feeds, even to some degree the forums - and stay instead in the private messaging systems, the tiny chatrooms, etc. 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.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> But mostly, between echo chambers, fake news, 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.
- manoj_venkat92 9y agoYou turn to automation when you get screwed by automation. Seriously?
- manoj_venkat92 9y agoThis is kinda sad
- Erazal 9y agoDoes somebody know what types of task are "losing out to automation" or where the "long term legacy contracts" left to ? EDIT : typo
- imtringued 9y agoPrimarily IT support.
- NTDF9 9y agoEvery time I hear/read about automation, all I can think about is the movie "Her". Humans are weak and companies are just waiting to exploit that.
- philjohn 9y agoThe problem is ... unless there's a universal income, or new jobs for all these people, who in the hell is going to buy your products?
- tobbyb 9y agoThat's why products are becoming progressively more expensive including things which traditionally became cheaper with generations. 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.
- walshemj 9y agothe $1000 phones are luxury goods at motog is a far cheaper smart phone
- Kurtz79 9y ago"That's why products are becoming progressively more expensive" Examples ? Since you mention 1000$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.
- briandear 9y agoWeren’t we making the same arguments with weavers in the early 1800s and with the assembly line? 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.
- happy-go-lucky 9y agoMost of these tech workers are too lazy to keep up with what’s going on or learn new skills, and their compensation is out of proportion to their usefulness. Their employers are no different. Both are always haunted by the fear of being made redundant by their clients. They suffer from aversion to change. As a matter of fact, the automation that the article says has taken the place of these workers should have happened long ago. Given a folder of thousands of files, tasked with deleting every 10th file in it, I would rather write a couple lines of code that does the job for me. Who wouldn’t approve of automating such jobs? One of Henry Ford’s quotes comes to mind: anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.
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- mistermann 9y agoWhat's your opinion of presenting speculation as fact?
- robbyt 9y agoIt's called "empirical evidence" probably from experience and observation.
- senthil_rajasek 9y agoOr anecdotal.
- iovrthoughtthis 9y ago
- crdoconnor 9y ago"People accustomed to holding down prestigious jobs and pulling in handsome salaries are losing out to automation, a shift away from long-term legacy contracts and curbs on U.S. work visas." 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.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoTo be fair the low hanging fruit for outsourcing is also the low hanging fruit for automation.
- crdoconnor 9y agoI think that's being completely unfair. Outsourcability is purely about how easy it is to extend a supply chain to another continent without impacting quality control and lead time. Automation is purely about how easy it is to program a computer to do the work. 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.).
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoYet if you look at what the West has offshored it's manufacturing, customer service, IT support, etc. All areas that are amenable to automation because the deliverable arrives down a wire or in a container. What hasn't been offshored are jobs that require a physical presence, these are much tougher to automate.
- crdoconnor 9y ago"Yet if you look at what the West has offshored it's manufacturing, customer service, IT support, etc. All areas that are amenable to automation" 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.
- megaman22 9y agoI've worked with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and never have I heard a story of where they outsourced IT work and it actually went well. Maybe it saved a few dollars, but invariably it added mountains of inconvenience, delay, wastage and frustration.
- walshemj 9y agoAnd many big companies now insource than outsource so as to have direct control
- matt_s 9y ago"Went well" is in the eye of the beholder, right? If you are beholding a spreadsheet that says it saves money you might think it went well. If you are working with the outsourced firm and have to constantly clean things up, educate them on how to do their jobs, etc. then it didn't "go well". 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.
- gaius 9y agoI've worked with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and never have I heard a story of where they outsourced IT work and it actually went well 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.
- LeeHwang 9y agoThe bigger concern is here is the clear link between automation and increased worker mental instability. 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.
- jstewartmobile 9y agoCanary in the coal mine, and not surprised. Most IT jobs only exist because Windows and commodity hardware are so thoroughly awful. It was only a matter of time before that was addressed, if only by erosion.
- purplezooey 9y agoReminds me of the time I hooked up Eliza to IRC.