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Outsourced Tech Jobs Are Increasingly Being Automated
Jason Koebler writes Yahoo announced [Tuesday] it would be laying off at least 400 workers in its Indian office, and back in February, IBM cut roughly 2,000 jobs there. Meanwhile, tech companies are beginning to see that many of the jobs it has outsourced can be automated, instead. 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: "The labor costs are becoming significant enough in China and India that there are very real discussions about automating jobs there now," Mark Muro, an economist at Brookings, said. "Companies are seeing that automated replacements are getting to be 'good enough.'"
If those are tech support jobs, then they might as well automate them. The best I can tell those workers they hire over there have essentially no skills in the products they are supporting. They basically just read what the computer screen tells them to say or ask. As a customer, I'd honestly rather be talking to a machine as it would give me the same answers but might actually be at little easier to understand.
After all, this will end all of the hassle of dealing with real people.
Maybe they can get virtual people to buy all of their products.
Virtual customers will be the next growth industry
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Taxation is kind of hard to see for phone support, since it's a cost center, not a revenue center.
You just aren't being very creative. If you want a little bit of profit to be made overseas, create a subsidiary in India that charges your company for phone support. Make sure the price is high enough that your subsidiary is making a profit, and you have just shifted some profit overseas.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Technology didn't cause the purchasing power of a dollar to collapse nearly 66% over the last 34 years. Federal reserve and congressional policy are the direct culprits. You don't have to be "anti-government" to pin much of this squarely on the federal government and Federal Reserve.
Between inflationary policies and allowing nearly unrestricted (even incentivizing by tax law) exploitation of arbitrage, we've see various government policies annihilate all of the savings and benies that technology would have brought to our economy.
I don't follow.
As in, your conclusion doesn't naturally follow from the facts presented.
I'd suggest you look up the stats on worker productivity.
You'll discover that there have been enormous benefits from technology,
but all of those benefits (profits) have accrued to the executives and shareholders,
instead of being distributed in anything resembling an equitable fashion.
Productivity has massively improved over the decades, employment has declined, and profits are up.
This is true in agriculture, manufacturing, and white collar jobs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Generally speaking, we *don't* have human beings flying planes. Autopilots do it. We still have human beings sitting in cockpits because of a) liability paranoia and b) unions.
For capitalism humans are required not only for labor but also as consumers. Therefore the elites require to find a way to distribute money to the rest otherwise their system will collapse. However, I have the distinct impression that they do not know that.