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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.