9 ms·

Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

100 points by nreece 12y ago

tbrownaw 12y ago
The title doesn't seem to match the content. Sure there's speculation about automation, but what they cite as actually happening is the outsourced jobs being brought back to have humans here on the proper side of the timezone and language barriers do them.
- geophile 12y ago
  The business geniuses who foisted this idiocy on us (software professionals) are now saying what we said 10+ years ago: it's an obviously dumb idea that doesn't actually save money.
ilaksh 12y ago
I know this is a tough sell but I am going to say it anyway. Automation effects every single person and every single job. For example, if your job is writing custom software, it becomes progressively harder to find problems that don't already have open source solutions. Or look at how component marketplaces and open source components or modules increases software reuse. There is not an infinite capacity for software complexity to increase. So that reduces the amount of work to be done simply because solutions are being shared rather reinvented.
- diltonm 12y ago
  >> For example, if your job is writing custom software, it becomes progressively harder to find problems that don't already have open source solutions. Open Source is just software, solutions take people. It will continue to be the case for the next 50 to 100 years. The computer industry is still a baby learning to crawl.
- bjelkeman-again 12y ago
  At the same time that means we can work at a higher level of abstraction. I see this daily in my work. There is a load of work to be done in providing tools for the none-Western world and that work has barely started, for example. Or environmental management, which hardly uses modern IT tools yet. I am not afraid of running out of work in my lifetime.
- tluyben2 12y ago
  Currently this is only working to some extent; there is no sign of software development demand going down because of open source or saturation. It's going up, and fast. I would guess the reason for that is that we don't have any way of truly composing those open (or closed; it doesn't matter for your example; closed source works in the same way; if you could buy it you would) source solutions to do something a company needs. You have to find them, test them, hook them together, test them a lot more, deploy them, test them a lot more and then change them over time. Most companies fail at finding them (and write them themselves); if they do, the first testing is done badly, so after hooking them up the solution won't work as expected etc etc. There simply is no robust way of composing 'software' easily without actually blowing your budget (a few times over) to see if the solution(s) fits. Intuitively I can see that, feature wise, SugarCRM, Solr, Hadoop, HBase, Postres and OpenERP would be a fit for your company if I could integrate them in a certain way; Google gives you enough clues for people who did this (years ago), so how hard can it be? Hard enough to spend massive amounts of money and then still not even be slightly happy about it. Happy meaning that your 1000s of employees can use it and your company runs on it as you, as CEO, envisioned. Is it more or less costly than writing only what you actually need from scratch? No idea, no-one is going to try that; you try SAP/Oracle/MS or this kind of thing and that's it.
- brandonmenc 12y ago
  > For example, if your job is writing custom software, it becomes progressively harder to find problems that don't already have open source solutions. There's a lot of work to be done writing glue code.
  - CmonDev 12y ago
    There is a whole business of 'integrating' the software products that are kind of ready (much more so than OSS) - ERP (Dynamics, SAP etc.).
- Padding 12y ago
  For better or worse, this isn't true. Software development to some extent is a creative process, thus eluding automation in many ways, though not for lack of trying. Much like book authors, in the general case, can't really "re-use" subplots of one another's stories, software devs can't really, in the general case, re-use one anoher's implementations. Of course there are many more specific situations in which software may be re-usable than there are for subplots in books .. but that doesn't impact the overall argument. Much like a detective story will have some crime being commited by some perpertrator, harming some victim and being investigated by some detective, an e-mail client will run on some OS have some GUI and exchange some IMAP and SMTP messages. But the creation of the specific detective story and the specific e-mail client still require creative input by some human before they can come into existence. Or is your argument that there is less need for e-mail clients and detective stories because there already are enough of them in existence? If so, then this is an issue orthogonal to automation itself.
gboudrias 12y ago
> The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do. Part of me thinks this will lead to make much more apparent the paradox of capitalism: Those with the most money can... make the most money. Over time this means it all gets funneled into just a few families' pockets, until they own everything (which is silly and most likely would not be put up with after a certain extent). Another part of me thinks that automation has been part of our society for a long time, and that taking it further only changes the kind of jobs everyone has, maybe even promoting equality by eliminating the more menial tasks (and therefore making every worker's skill and experience important, instead of them being just a replaceable cog). Either way it seems absolutely inevitable in the long term, and I don't see a point in pretending it's not going to happen.
- msandford 12y ago
  A huge part of the problem here is the low, low interest rate environment we're in. Low interest rates make expensive machines cheaper than humans. High interest rates make humans cheaper than machines. (For a range of values of cheaper) Being able to afford a $300k house on $50k/year is great until you don't make the $50k/year anymore because you've been automated out of a job. In the past people with a lot of money could invest their money and see a fairly stable, secure return of 5-15% a year depending on the exact risk profile of their investments; savings accounts -> stocks. Now if you have a lot of money you can buy businesses and replace people with capital equipment. Better returns than investing in the stock market (or bank accounts!) and it's basically off-limits to people who don't have 7+ figure amounts of cash. Which statistically is basically everyone. Higher interest rates would let the rich enjoy more work-free income but it also keeps normal people in jobs. And it provides some kind of incentive to save; interest in a bank account is basically scale-free. I think maybe that's another one of the problems we're seeing, opportunities to grow your wealth aren't scale invariant. A little money has very, very few opportunities to earn interest. A lot of money has a many opportunities to be grown.
  - bduerst 12y ago
    Not really - that's kind of a false dichotomy. Low interest rates are present to stimulate spending. It allows for investments in capital expenditures (e.g. machines) that would otherwise have up front fixed costs that made it unattainable. This can allow for businesses to invest into new markets or expand where they otherwise would have not spent anything.
bruceb 12y ago
Cites recent layoffs but has no real stats on the decline of outsourcing, near shoring, etc. Weak. Part of the problem with India is lack of standards. There are people who are good at programming in both the US and India and people who are bad at it. The problem is in the US most of the bad ones don't end up getting a CS degree where in India they do. This means there are a lot of people in India who have a little bit of skill and can get a job but not do it that great. Their US counterpart might have switched to business or something else as they are less expected to get a tech (viewed a good a job) related job by their family. Obviously there are more complexities but bottom line its not just the cost it is the quality of work.
- Bahamut 12y ago
  "The problem is in the US most of the bad ones don't end up getting a CS degree where in India they do." There are plenty in the US that have a CS degree and aren't good at programming. It isn't a magic ticket to knowledge.
- tluyben2 12y ago
  To add to this; a lot of companies in India just gather as many people as they can with a CS degree in a building (often 1000s) and hire them out in 'teams' to western companies. This is a valid (currently) business plan which makes them a lot of money. It also gives outsourcing a really bad name, but that does not seem to deter companies from hiring these kind of, let's call them what they are, sweatshops. The idea is definitely appealing; you hire educated women and men, usually they are monitored (often by camera's!) to make sure they site and work 8 hours / day, 5-6 days / week and they have the skills you need. Not happy? You get another person right away! You can expand or shrink your team(s) at any time. That they are treated like robots sitting in long rows of far too little space and that they are not allowed to get up besides for lunch and tea at set times is not interesting to most; that this kind of environment (not even looking at if they are good at their jobs or not; some are, some are not like you say) is destroying any chance of getting quality anyway is lost on most people who hire. This market is growing as it does sound incredibly attractive on paper. The prices are also still a lot (for programmers you pay around 20-40% of what you would pay in the west, it used to be 5-10%) lower than the same role (on paper) in 'the west'. I hear some companies actually get work done this way and are very happy with it, growing continuously without worrying about who does the tech; they have 100s of companies to pick from and 100-1000s of employees in these companies. How they manage that, I have no clue, but I do hear a lot of my Indian friends who try to make something 'west' quality in India complain about these popping up a lot and a lot young guys dream of making these, in essence no-risk at the moment, 'brain work' farms.
beedogs 12y ago
"What does it mean for the economies of these up-and-coming world powers? Well, probably the same thing that it means for everyone else: The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do." Or, you know, basic income. Why is the answer to "there are no jobs anymore" always "well, I guess you can starve, then"?
- noonespecial 12y ago
  Its almost like a signaling error. A farmer would gladly grow corn in exchange for a tractor and a mechanic would gladly supply that tractor in exchange for corn, but the corn that theoretically could be factory farmed by automation would be cheaper than the farmer can grown and the robot built tractor would theoretically be cheaper than the mechanic can build so neither do anything. Both farmer and mechanic starve and then the automated systems make neither corn nor tractor while the capital owner wonders why no one is buying. The whole system would be made richer by injecting the small signal a basic income would provide into the negative feedback loop thats keeping it damped.
  - zalzane 12y ago
    The second half of your post just gave me a vietnam flashback to Linear Systems back in college I wonder if you could actually model economic systems using impulse response and signal filtering mathematics
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      Absolutely you could. Indeed, it has arguably already been done, albeit indirectly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer
    - quanticle 12y ago
      I don't know about impulse response and signal filtering, but the Soviets did try to model their economy with linear models. Cosma Shalizi put up a good analysis [1] of why this is very very difficult. Simply put, any kind of "real" economy has so many variables (in the kinds of goods and services, their various quality levels, and the locations in both time and space that goods and services have to be) that any kind of linear programming quickly gets swamped by the sheer number of variables that have to be adjusted in order to compute an optimal outcome. So yes, in theory you can model an economy using a linear system. It's not even an NP problem. But in practice, the computational complexity is high enough (though still within P) that even toy economies with as few as a thousand elements become impossible to optimize with linear programming. [1] http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza...
joshwa 12y ago
The actual product (actual content 2 links from the article): http://www.blueprism.com/about/bpm.php http://www.blueprism.com/about/bpm.php Basically sounds like Selenium for mainframes/win32 powered by some decision tables? That's certainly one way to solve the enterprise integration problem...
julie1 12y ago
People are not tired of this kind of FUD? Whatever you do good devs are a limited resource, and all that is made to try to walk around the problem worsen it: - outsourcing ? => You have to compensate in supervision and you lose in quality. (Indians are not bad coders, but there is something called the Babel tower effect that creates a lot of signal perturbation/costs) - agile? => Trying to cut on correctness and detailed specifications to ship value faster result in insecure useless softwares. Ofc a startup owner does not care of the sustainability of his product because he will cash out a lot of $$ before the problem will happen. But what about the customers and the economy relying on it? - Web as an UI because web dev is less expensive than GUI devs/shipping? GUI devs then where making atrocious bugs because they were clueless on asynchronuous coding (reentrant code) and money related data still needs to be transactional (transactional is a property that is exclusive of distributed). Devs that understand this class of problems are still few, and Web dev is causing even more problems. - The Cloud? It has non linear costing! If you x2 your customers you cannot predict your pricing unless you make fat margins, and swap KPEX and slowly linear OPEX for strongly growing non linear OPEX is kind of totally mathematically irrational (except for the one doing fat margins). - Containers? In 1999 the problem of the GUI was already the dependency Hell. Well, now instead of solving the satisfiability of dependencies (NP complete problem) in one closed system you do it on a set of M containers that still requires internal KSAT solving (yes instead of solving one KSAT, you solve N KSAT coupled to M KSAT). (so we created the DevOps and more security holes!) When automation can replace people, it means the industry does not requires skilled people. That is not the case. Can't you see there is a trivial contradiction in the thesis of this article? Seriously this insanity never ends? IT industry is just bullshiting the rest of the economy to sustain its totally insane model and paying our daily wages. I would be happy of this waste of money (I am a still a coder) if only people were not starving in the streets and our economies were not suffering and thus creating instabilities all around the world. I long for the internet 2.0 bubble to explode soon so that we can get back to an economy that profits to everyone not only the IT crowd.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  "...if only people were not starving in the streets..." You have a bigger problem with IT then investment banking and international politics? I am personally very happy that once in a while engineers are getting a kind of fair deal. Of course let's not forget that salaries in Silicon Valley were artificially suppressed for a while in an illegal agreement between the likes of Google and Apple. So being underpaid is what we should be really complaining about.
jmadsen 12y ago
Interesting to read all these comments about the "real" problem. What the article actually SAID was: "Labor in India and China is still cheaper than it is in the United States, but it's not the obvious economic move that it was just a few years ago: Wages in India have increased about 10 percent annually over the last five years" In other words, it might seem - I say might, because the article is obviously not a real heavy-hitter with data - that the old idea of wages balancing over regions is coming true. I find this interesting because I used to reject this notion, because I feel labor is actually very static (you can't just freely move to China if the jobs move there), but my economics days pre-date the internet and much of what we can do today via technological advances. So, I'm not really sure about anything based only on this article, but find this to be very interesting. As far as the Automation part goes, I think in the short- to medium-run it will simply become a case of "Automating things" is the new hot job for a while. Purely theoretical, long-run thoughts? We are moving closer to that Utopia of machines doing all the labor, while Joe Man-on-the-street gets a guaranteed yearly salary so he doesn't rebel and kill everyone with money. Unless Running Man is your thing.
- luch 12y ago
  There is another interesting side-effect : companies from developed countries are unwillingly training low-wage workers from 3rd the world. As an anecdotal evidence, the company I'm working for has partially outsourced their customer services (technical maintenance, etc.) to Northern Africa in order to lessen the wage bill. Their problem is the following one : as soon as they find a competent employee and training him, he expatriate himself into Europe and sell his skills for a much better payroll. Now my firm is stuck with incompetent salary men and old-timers which aren't willing to relocate themselves.
hokkos 12y ago
The author of this weak article seems to surf the waves of "robots are taking our jebs" because he brings no proof that the layoff of Yahoo, IBM, Cisco in India are the results of automation or business shrinking or strategic decision about outsourcing. Also this site hacks the scrolling wheel in a bad way, small scrolls seems discarded.
- gnufied 12y ago
  It is very interesting that - he uses Yahoo layoffs as an example. Because from what I know, by and large Yahoo hires better engineers than Outsourcing firms. And since I have friends who have worked for Yahoo India, the kind of jobs they did - are not going to be automated away until we invent software capable of writing complex programs. In other words - can a robot write/maintain Yahoo maps? Something tells me - we are not there yet. Overall the article is load of bull. and I don't think author has expertise required to judge what kinda of IT jobs are going to be automated away and what kind don't.
netcan 12y ago
Putting commentary on things like this is always tricky. Reality is complicated and perspectives tend to be more impoverished. I think part of this is actually a narrowing of gaps between middle classes in large cheap labour markets like China and the working poor in Europe and the US, mostly due to the rising middle class wealth in the former. A second major cause is progressing technology and culture. "Automotion" is not always this literal version of machines directly replacing humans. A website where you can renew your insurance, buy plane tickets, make a complaint or order a pizza is automation of a sort. It's not necessarily a self driving scooter deliver that pizza. This is harder to fetishize as an ideology. We are not replacing hand looms with steam powered looms. It's more like we decided to just be naked instead.
dscrd 12y ago
They were at some point?
t-rex1 12y ago
I keep wondering, say the rise of automation continues at the rate its going right now, eventually eliminating a lot of opportunities, then what happens to the people? how would a good number of the population be able to further earn a living? I think this growth of automation needs to be taken a bit more serious than it is right now. I can envision it causing quite a problem in the society.
- Robadob 12y ago
  Basic income is a proposed economic solution that would change welfare such that everyone receives enough money to survive from the government and is therefore encouraged to work to earn money for greater comforts. It's been suggested that this model of welfare allows people to work less hours with other possible benefits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income I've not studied economics but I would expect there might be other proposals which could also be suitable for a society with far greater population than jobs.
germanogmn1 12y ago
I dont't understand why people think that's bad. That means that workers are getting paid more and are not willing to sell their labor for a low price. Machines make the work that nobody want to do for what it's worth.
known 12y ago
I believe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income is the solution to globalization/automation
known 12y ago
Hope Govt imposes tax on Corporate Income, not Profit.

100 points by nreece 12y ago

The title doesn't seem to match the content. Sure there's speculation about automation, but what they cite as actually happening is the outsourced jobs being brought back to have humans here on the proper side of the timezone and language barriers do them.

geophile 12y ago
The business geniuses who foisted this idiocy on us (software professionals) are now saying what we said 10+ years ago: it's an obviously dumb idea that doesn't actually save money.

ilaksh 12y ago

I know this is a tough sell but I am going to say it anyway. Automation effects every single person and every single job. For example, if your job is writing custom software, it becomes progressively harder to find problems that don't already have open source solutions. Or look at how component marketplaces and open source components or modules increases software reuse. There is not an infinite capacity for software complexity to increase. So that reduces the amount of work to be done simply because solutions are being shared rather reinvented.

diltonm 12y ago
>> For example, if your job is writing custom software, it becomes progressively harder to find problems that don't already have open source solutions. Open Source is just software, solutions take people. It will continue to be the case for the next 50 to 100 years. The computer industry is still a baby learning to crawl.
bjelkeman-again 12y ago
At the same time that means we can work at a higher level of abstraction. I see this daily in my work. There is a load of work to be done in providing tools for the none-Western world and that work has barely started, for example. Or environmental management, which hardly uses modern IT tools yet. I am not afraid of running out of work in my lifetime.
tluyben2 12y ago
Currently this is only working to some extent; there is no sign of software development demand going down because of open source or saturation. It's going up, and fast. I would guess the reason for that is that we don't have any way of truly composing those open (or closed; it doesn't matter for your example; closed source works in the same way; if you could buy it you would) source solutions to do something a company needs. You have to find them, test them, hook them together, test them a lot more, deploy them, test them a lot more and then change them over time. Most companies fail at finding them (and write them themselves); if they do, the first testing is done badly, so after hooking them up the solution won't work as expected etc etc. There simply is no robust way of composing 'software' easily without actually blowing your budget (a few times over) to see if the solution(s) fits. Intuitively I can see that, feature wise, SugarCRM, Solr, Hadoop, HBase, Postres and OpenERP would be a fit for your company if I could integrate them in a certain way; Google gives you enough clues for people who did this (years ago), so how hard can it be? Hard enough to spend massive amounts of money and then still not even be slightly happy about it. Happy meaning that your 1000s of employees can use it and your company runs on it as you, as CEO, envisioned. Is it more or less costly than writing only what you actually need from scratch? No idea, no-one is going to try that; you try SAP/Oracle/MS or this kind of thing and that's it.
brandonmenc 12y ago
> For example, if your job is writing custom software, it becomes progressively harder to find problems that don't already have open source solutions. There's a lot of work to be done writing glue code.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  There is a whole business of 'integrating' the software products that are kind of ready (much more so than OSS) - ERP (Dynamics, SAP etc.).
Padding 12y ago
For better or worse, this isn't true. Software development to some extent is a creative process, thus eluding automation in many ways, though not for lack of trying. Much like book authors, in the general case, can't really "re-use" subplots of one another's stories, software devs can't really, in the general case, re-use one anoher's implementations. Of course there are many more specific situations in which software may be re-usable than there are for subplots in books .. but that doesn't impact the overall argument. Much like a detective story will have some crime being commited by some perpertrator, harming some victim and being investigated by some detective, an e-mail client will run on some OS have some GUI and exchange some IMAP and SMTP messages. But the creation of the specific detective story and the specific e-mail client still require creative input by some human before they can come into existence. Or is your argument that there is less need for e-mail clients and detective stories because there already are enough of them in existence? If so, then this is an issue orthogonal to automation itself.

gboudrias 12y ago

> The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do. Part of me thinks this will lead to make much more apparent the paradox of capitalism: Those with the most money can... make the most money. Over time this means it all gets funneled into just a few families' pockets, until they own everything (which is silly and most likely would not be put up with after a certain extent). Another part of me thinks that automation has been part of our society for a long time, and that taking it further only changes the kind of jobs everyone has, maybe even promoting equality by eliminating the more menial tasks (and therefore making every worker's skill and experience important, instead of them being just a replaceable cog). Either way it seems absolutely inevitable in the long term, and I don't see a point in pretending it's not going to happen.

msandford 12y ago
A huge part of the problem here is the low, low interest rate environment we're in. Low interest rates make expensive machines cheaper than humans. High interest rates make humans cheaper than machines. (For a range of values of cheaper) Being able to afford a $300k house on $50k/year is great until you don't make the $50k/year anymore because you've been automated out of a job. In the past people with a lot of money could invest their money and see a fairly stable, secure return of 5-15% a year depending on the exact risk profile of their investments; savings accounts -> stocks. Now if you have a lot of money you can buy businesses and replace people with capital equipment. Better returns than investing in the stock market (or bank accounts!) and it's basically off-limits to people who don't have 7+ figure amounts of cash. Which statistically is basically everyone. Higher interest rates would let the rich enjoy more work-free income but it also keeps normal people in jobs. And it provides some kind of incentive to save; interest in a bank account is basically scale-free. I think maybe that's another one of the problems we're seeing, opportunities to grow your wealth aren't scale invariant. A little money has very, very few opportunities to earn interest. A lot of money has a many opportunities to be grown.
- bduerst 12y ago
  Not really - that's kind of a false dichotomy. Low interest rates are present to stimulate spending. It allows for investments in capital expenditures (e.g. machines) that would otherwise have up front fixed costs that made it unattainable. This can allow for businesses to invest into new markets or expand where they otherwise would have not spent anything.

bruceb 12y ago

Cites recent layoffs but has no real stats on the decline of outsourcing, near shoring, etc. Weak. Part of the problem with India is lack of standards. There are people who are good at programming in both the US and India and people who are bad at it. The problem is in the US most of the bad ones don't end up getting a CS degree where in India they do. This means there are a lot of people in India who have a little bit of skill and can get a job but not do it that great. Their US counterpart might have switched to business or something else as they are less expected to get a tech (viewed a good a job) related job by their family. Obviously there are more complexities but bottom line its not just the cost it is the quality of work.

Bahamut 12y ago
"The problem is in the US most of the bad ones don't end up getting a CS degree where in India they do." There are plenty in the US that have a CS degree and aren't good at programming. It isn't a magic ticket to knowledge.
tluyben2 12y ago
To add to this; a lot of companies in India just gather as many people as they can with a CS degree in a building (often 1000s) and hire them out in 'teams' to western companies. This is a valid (currently) business plan which makes them a lot of money. It also gives outsourcing a really bad name, but that does not seem to deter companies from hiring these kind of, let's call them what they are, sweatshops. The idea is definitely appealing; you hire educated women and men, usually they are monitored (often by camera's!) to make sure they site and work 8 hours / day, 5-6 days / week and they have the skills you need. Not happy? You get another person right away! You can expand or shrink your team(s) at any time. That they are treated like robots sitting in long rows of far too little space and that they are not allowed to get up besides for lunch and tea at set times is not interesting to most; that this kind of environment (not even looking at if they are good at their jobs or not; some are, some are not like you say) is destroying any chance of getting quality anyway is lost on most people who hire. This market is growing as it does sound incredibly attractive on paper. The prices are also still a lot (for programmers you pay around 20-40% of what you would pay in the west, it used to be 5-10%) lower than the same role (on paper) in 'the west'. I hear some companies actually get work done this way and are very happy with it, growing continuously without worrying about who does the tech; they have 100s of companies to pick from and 100-1000s of employees in these companies. How they manage that, I have no clue, but I do hear a lot of my Indian friends who try to make something 'west' quality in India complain about these popping up a lot and a lot young guys dream of making these, in essence no-risk at the moment, 'brain work' farms.

beedogs 12y ago

"What does it mean for the economies of these up-and-coming world powers? Well, probably the same thing that it means for everyone else: The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do." Or, you know, basic income. Why is the answer to "there are no jobs anymore" always "well, I guess you can starve, then"?

noonespecial 12y ago
Its almost like a signaling error. A farmer would gladly grow corn in exchange for a tractor and a mechanic would gladly supply that tractor in exchange for corn, but the corn that theoretically could be factory farmed by automation would be cheaper than the farmer can grown and the robot built tractor would theoretically be cheaper than the mechanic can build so neither do anything. Both farmer and mechanic starve and then the automated systems make neither corn nor tractor while the capital owner wonders why no one is buying. The whole system would be made richer by injecting the small signal a basic income would provide into the negative feedback loop thats keeping it damped.
- zalzane 12y ago
  The second half of your post just gave me a vietnam flashback to Linear Systems back in college I wonder if you could actually model economic systems using impulse response and signal filtering mathematics
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Absolutely you could. Indeed, it has arguably already been done, albeit indirectly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer
  - quanticle 12y ago
    I don't know about impulse response and signal filtering, but the Soviets did try to model their economy with linear models. Cosma Shalizi put up a good analysis [1] of why this is very very difficult. Simply put, any kind of "real" economy has so many variables (in the kinds of goods and services, their various quality levels, and the locations in both time and space that goods and services have to be) that any kind of linear programming quickly gets swamped by the sheer number of variables that have to be adjusted in order to compute an optimal outcome. So yes, in theory you can model an economy using a linear system. It's not even an NP problem. But in practice, the computational complexity is high enough (though still within P) that even toy economies with as few as a thousand elements become impossible to optimize with linear programming. [1] http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza...

joshwa 12y ago

The actual product (actual content 2 links from the article): http://www.blueprism.com/about/bpm.php http://www.blueprism.com/about/bpm.php Basically sounds like Selenium for mainframes/win32 powered by some decision tables? That's certainly one way to solve the enterprise integration problem...

julie1 12y ago

People are not tired of this kind of FUD? Whatever you do good devs are a limited resource, and all that is made to try to walk around the problem worsen it: - outsourcing ? => You have to compensate in supervision and you lose in quality. (Indians are not bad coders, but there is something called the Babel tower effect that creates a lot of signal perturbation/costs) - agile? => Trying to cut on correctness and detailed specifications to ship value faster result in insecure useless softwares. Ofc a startup owner does not care of the sustainability of his product because he will cash out a lot of $$ before the problem will happen. But what about the customers and the economy relying on it? - Web as an UI because web dev is less expensive than GUI devs/shipping? GUI devs then where making atrocious bugs because they were clueless on asynchronuous coding (reentrant code) and money related data still needs to be transactional (transactional is a property that is exclusive of distributed). Devs that understand this class of problems are still few, and Web dev is causing even more problems. - The Cloud? It has non linear costing! If you x2 your customers you cannot predict your pricing unless you make fat margins, and swap KPEX and slowly linear OPEX for strongly growing non linear OPEX is kind of totally mathematically irrational (except for the one doing fat margins). - Containers? In 1999 the problem of the GUI was already the dependency Hell. Well, now instead of solving the satisfiability of dependencies (NP complete problem) in one closed system you do it on a set of M containers that still requires internal KSAT solving (yes instead of solving one KSAT, you solve N KSAT coupled to M KSAT). (so we created the DevOps and more security holes!) When automation can replace people, it means the industry does not requires skilled people. That is not the case. Can't you see there is a trivial contradiction in the thesis of this article? Seriously this insanity never ends? IT industry is just bullshiting the rest of the economy to sustain its totally insane model and paying our daily wages. I would be happy of this waste of money (I am a still a coder) if only people were not starving in the streets and our economies were not suffering and thus creating instabilities all around the world. I long for the internet 2.0 bubble to explode soon so that we can get back to an economy that profits to everyone not only the IT crowd.

CmonDev 12y ago
"...if only people were not starving in the streets..." You have a bigger problem with IT then investment banking and international politics? I am personally very happy that once in a while engineers are getting a kind of fair deal. Of course let's not forget that salaries in Silicon Valley were artificially suppressed for a while in an illegal agreement between the likes of Google and Apple. So being underpaid is what we should be really complaining about.

jmadsen 12y ago

Interesting to read all these comments about the "real" problem. What the article actually SAID was: "Labor in India and China is still cheaper than it is in the United States, but it's not the obvious economic move that it was just a few years ago: Wages in India have increased about 10 percent annually over the last five years" In other words, it might seem - I say might, because the article is obviously not a real heavy-hitter with data - that the old idea of wages balancing over regions is coming true. I find this interesting because I used to reject this notion, because I feel labor is actually very static (you can't just freely move to China if the jobs move there), but my economics days pre-date the internet and much of what we can do today via technological advances. So, I'm not really sure about anything based only on this article, but find this to be very interesting. As far as the Automation part goes, I think in the short- to medium-run it will simply become a case of "Automating things" is the new hot job for a while. Purely theoretical, long-run thoughts? We are moving closer to that Utopia of machines doing all the labor, while Joe Man-on-the-street gets a guaranteed yearly salary so he doesn't rebel and kill everyone with money. Unless Running Man is your thing.

luch 12y ago
There is another interesting side-effect : companies from developed countries are unwillingly training low-wage workers from 3rd the world. As an anecdotal evidence, the company I'm working for has partially outsourced their customer services (technical maintenance, etc.) to Northern Africa in order to lessen the wage bill. Their problem is the following one : as soon as they find a competent employee and training him, he expatriate himself into Europe and sell his skills for a much better payroll. Now my firm is stuck with incompetent salary men and old-timers which aren't willing to relocate themselves.

hokkos 12y ago

The author of this weak article seems to surf the waves of "robots are taking our jebs" because he brings no proof that the layoff of Yahoo, IBM, Cisco in India are the results of automation or business shrinking or strategic decision about outsourcing. Also this site hacks the scrolling wheel in a bad way, small scrolls seems discarded.

gnufied 12y ago
It is very interesting that - he uses Yahoo layoffs as an example. Because from what I know, by and large Yahoo hires better engineers than Outsourcing firms. And since I have friends who have worked for Yahoo India, the kind of jobs they did - are not going to be automated away until we invent software capable of writing complex programs. In other words - can a robot write/maintain Yahoo maps? Something tells me - we are not there yet. Overall the article is load of bull. and I don't think author has expertise required to judge what kinda of IT jobs are going to be automated away and what kind don't.

netcan 12y ago

Putting commentary on things like this is always tricky. Reality is complicated and perspectives tend to be more impoverished. I think part of this is actually a narrowing of gaps between middle classes in large cheap labour markets like China and the working poor in Europe and the US, mostly due to the rising middle class wealth in the former. A second major cause is progressing technology and culture. "Automotion" is not always this literal version of machines directly replacing humans. A website where you can renew your insurance, buy plane tickets, make a complaint or order a pizza is automation of a sort. It's not necessarily a self driving scooter deliver that pizza. This is harder to fetishize as an ideology. We are not replacing hand looms with steam powered looms. It's more like we decided to just be naked instead.

dscrd 12y ago

They were at some point?

t-rex1 12y ago

I keep wondering, say the rise of automation continues at the rate its going right now, eventually eliminating a lot of opportunities, then what happens to the people? how would a good number of the population be able to further earn a living? I think this growth of automation needs to be taken a bit more serious than it is right now. I can envision it causing quite a problem in the society.

Robadob 12y ago
Basic income is a proposed economic solution that would change welfare such that everyone receives enough money to survive from the government and is therefore encouraged to work to earn money for greater comforts. It's been suggested that this model of welfare allows people to work less hours with other possible benefits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income I've not studied economics but I would expect there might be other proposals which could also be suitable for a society with far greater population than jobs.

germanogmn1 12y ago

I dont't understand why people think that's bad. That means that workers are getting paid more and are not willing to sell their labor for a low price. Machines make the work that nobody want to do for what it's worth.

known 12y ago

I believe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income is the solution to globalization/automation

known 12y ago

Hope Govt imposes tax on Corporate Income, not Profit.