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The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

economist.com

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Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#31
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What YT videos?

About working conditions in Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) also known as scamming centers?

What does that have to do with the general state of the whole industry? "Scamming" rarely falls into proper "jobs" anyway.

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Computer says no" has been a trope of terrible customer service long before AI.

"Computer says no" is about unhelpful bureaucracy. Being knowingly locked to a specific procedure and unwilling to divert from it is a different thing from mistakes being made that you are blissfully unaware of. The problem is now invisible and the patient is dying for no reason anyone can discern.

The "unhelpful bureaucracy" arises precisely because the process is structured so there's no point in the chain that can actually consider and solve your problem directly. The process is the point, outsourcing work to the opposite end of the globe has long been a perfect way to guarantee no it's robust against errors like "compassion" and "helpfulness", and that's as true of LLMs performing those functions tomorrow as it was of people doing it yesterday.

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooph, now the AI will be wrong and the human won't know it. And that's running our... let me see... life saving care. Cool. cool. cool.

Your average devs are wrong more than the AI is at this point.

This is not about development. This is about rubber stamping insurance denial by an unaccountable system.

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#34
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What YT videos?

About working conditions in Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) also known as scamming centers?

POGOs are criminalized and often operated by illegal immigrant Chinese people, it's not really representative. At least that's my understanding having lived in Manila for a few years.

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#35
post #2

From a recent article in The Economist. It turns out that once again many of the jobs that people predicted would be eliminated by AI have instead received a boost, at least for now. This closely follows another recent report on how Indian BPO firms are surprisingly thriving due to AI. "Moreover, AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models o…

I visited India recently and when I saw just how many companies have a GCC there I was mindblown. Lots of cool offices, engineering and technical roles, great work life balance and generally a different vibe. Literally every company that I could recognise had a back office there.

> great work life balance

Oh dear

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#37
Outside the English-speaking world, there's generally been a knowledge gap when it comes to programming. Better resources weren't being shared, and AI helps bridge that gap. You could learn the basics, but higher-quality materials were hard to come by. AI actually solves that—so people's reactions depend a lot on their environment

Even learning through open source participation requires understanding the English speaking culture, and that's a kind of knowledge that only people who have lived in those countries can really grasp.

In my case, most of my knowledge came from Microsoft's learning center materials. To actually learn deeply, I had to read papers. And I only knew about them because I went to graduate school. But there were already many libraries that made it easier to apply that knowledge without reading the papers directly.

So I think how useful AI is depends a lot on where you live and what kind of environment you're in

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#38
People have a bad intuition about economic mechanisms, but that does not mean that AI won't cause huge regressive effects.

The transition from independent artisans to factory work didn't cause massive unemployment. But it cause the former artisans to lose out, because they no longer had the bargaining power they had before - their work was now a commodity. This resulted in "Engel's pause", a period in which wages stagnated, and so conditions got worse because prices also increased.

But AI also isn't just automation. It's the automation of automation. You may think that you will just level up and learn the new skill set of managing AIs, but the AI companies will be collecting the data to automate that too. Often by watching you.

Re: The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

#39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, paradoxically Indian software outsourcing is growing. I guess the way the companies are thinking about this is we need some sort of human oversight for all the work the LLMs are doing, might as well pay someone the least amount possible to do that.

Don't understand why this should not have been obvious. If you have technology that allows expensive workers to do things cheaper why wouldn't same technology allow cheaper workers to do stuff even cheaper... And cheap is good...

Can you explain why freelance writing and translation is being destroyed:

> https://researchprofiles.ku.dk/en/publications/winners-and-l...

Surely, AI helps them do stuff even cheaper, and cheap is good, so their business should be booming?

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