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Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

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Re: Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

#41
By trying to be more flexible with work, you thought you were getting control of your life. You could come home and take care of the kids while handling a few emails. But you actually arranged it so you ended up out of work because a telemigrant took your job for much less.

I keep thinking about the age-old discussion about why the tech industry doesn't just move away from Silicon Valley to a location with a low cost of living. And the answer usually involves the existence of a critical mass of highly effective potential employees, of a cluster economy. There really are some jobs whose pay rates do not matter. But not all that many. All the rest will sooner or later be vulnerable to global outsourcing/telemigration.

Re: Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

#42
post #10

Not buying it, sorry. Maybe some jobs, but all this nonsense about automation taking over everything is purely to sow FUD and for no other reason. Oh, automatic trucks, yeah, probably not. That's going to be really hard to pull off because the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously. Same with drones--the first one that crashes into a house and causes a…

> the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously

Human driven trucks kill people now and have done so for decades. IMHO, the liability comparison that will matter, the one that regulators, insurance companies, the courts and the market will eventually embrace will instead be: are automatic trucks as safe or just a little bit safer than human driven trucks?

Re: Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

#43
post #2

I remember reading Average is Over and A Fairwell to Alms just when I first started working. They convinced me that labour power was going to decline precipitously. I stared saving 60+% of everything I made and putting it into index funds. Anyone making a good salary should attempt the same. Much of white collar work is extremely amenable to automation, much more than even truck driving: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wi…

Being a consultant with clients in a wide range of industries I concur. Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort. They are one successful software project from losing their jobs. Lucky for them their companies are terrible at shipping software. Conversely, automating the work of a plumber would require a massive investment in AI and…

"Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort."

After looking at some of the business processes at my company I am not so sure about this anymore. There are a lot of jobs that are pretty mundane but when you look a little closer most of the processes have a lot of exceptions where the employee makes decisions that don't follow the process exactly. From what I have seen it's really hard to come up with a recipe that can be 100% automated because of all these exceptions. It seems to me that humans are a buffer that sometimes corrects unforeseen things and without that buffer the organization would do stupid things.

Re: Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

#45
post #2

I remember reading Average is Over and A Fairwell to Alms just when I first started working. They convinced me that labour power was going to decline precipitously. I stared saving 60+% of everything I made and putting it into index funds. Anyone making a good salary should attempt the same. Much of white collar work is extremely amenable to automation, much more than even truck driving: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wi…

> I think it is a really good idea to start accumulating capital, even at today’s valuations.

This is an interesting take. The alternative to individually trying to each become capitalists, is grouping together and making sure we all have access to the proceeds of automation.

Re: Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

#46
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a large tech company that had an enormous finance department. They did everything in Excel. Our job was to automate their work. The tools we built were routinely more accurate and faster than the finance people were. When our work was less accurate, it was because the input was bad. The input came from the finance team. The only reason they didn't disappear entirely was because they'd convinced management…

> I worked at a large tech company that had How big is their finance department now?

I don't know, I don't work there anymore. But my understanding is that it's essentially the same size.

Re: Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

#47
post #10

Not buying it, sorry. Maybe some jobs, but all this nonsense about automation taking over everything is purely to sow FUD and for no other reason. Oh, automatic trucks, yeah, probably not. That's going to be really hard to pull off because the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously. Same with drones--the first one that crashes into a house and causes a…

"As far as replacing the software engineering work I do with "freelancers" is a sure way to put my whole company out of business. If there were any freelancers out there who could assist us we would have already hired them. We don't want "freelancers" we want people who will be around to build up institutional knowledge and perform because they know our company and our data. As it is, our office in India is about 30% as efficient as the one on the US, and that whole experiment has already been running for almost two decades. It's not just the timezones, it's just the whole nature of the job. We have people with 15-20 years of experience working with us. It's just too naive a picture to say "globotics" which is just a made up word--even says so in the article. If you want good outcomes in a corporation, it would be wise to hire good people and not just stock up on human cattle. "

You can see this at the IT department in my company. They are totally outsourced and offshored and it shows that they are not capable of doing anything moderately complex because every time they start something that start from 0. They have almost no people with any institutional memory so before they start something they have to spend an insane amount of time learning the current environment. If they had people who have experience from past projects they could do things in a fraction of time. But I guess the short term benefit of firing expensive experienced workers is easier to justify than the long term benefit of keeping them.

Re: Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

#48
post #10

Not buying it, sorry. Maybe some jobs, but all this nonsense about automation taking over everything is purely to sow FUD and for no other reason. Oh, automatic trucks, yeah, probably not. That's going to be really hard to pull off because the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously. Same with drones--the first one that crashes into a house and causes a…

> the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously Human driven trucks kill people now and have done so for decades. IMHO, the liability comparison that will matter, the one that regulators, insurance companies, the courts and the market will eventually embrace will instead be: are automatic trucks as safe or just a little bit safer than human driven trucks?

It's not that easy. The whole legal system is based on finding the party to blame. With human drivers it's the driver or maybe the company but if something with an automated truck happens who do you blame? I am sure companies would love to be able to hide behind an automated system.

Re: Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation has been in use in the auto industry for decades, and yet it employs much more people than it did before automation was widespread.

That's simply not true, and impressively so. Despite the growth of car sales worldwide it takes far fewer employees to run a car factory than it did in say the fifties or sixties - probably 90% fewer. I find it just about impossible to believe there's been over a ten fold increase in number of plants to compensate for each factory's reduction of staff. UK's Ford Dagenham - mainly an engine plant - once used to employ…

Compare these numbers from the 80s-90s to current data.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/sept/wk5/art02.htm?view_fu...

https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm

Re: Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization

#50
This guy is straining to get his new words to become memes.

"Globotics". "Telemigration". Please. Companies have been outsourcing call centers to India for decades now. That trend seems to have peaked; outside of telemarketing, the lower cost isn't worth the lower performance.

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