Monday, March 15, 2010

Rise of the Robots

Article = none, personal opinion.

Lost my job a while back (well they announced it , still got a month left before they kick me to the curb). It got outsourced to the Philipines. The dollar a day guys , as I call them.

I phone tech support for my Dell Computer. I get India.

I talk to a guy at work , ask him how long he's been here. Tells me he's worked four call centers the last year. Why you quit so many jobs ? He didn't . They all outsourced to pakistan. Or china. Or in the case of the one we work at at the moment, the philipines.

Dollar a day guys taking over everything.

So I'm thinking maybe retraining, what is it I can retrain in that they cannot outsource to these dollar a day guys ?

I remember an old news article on the internet. It was very very hard to get doctors to move to small towns, so their solution was to build robots that the doctors could run by remote control. Nice color monitors, remote controled hands.. get a doctor on the line to sit in the control booth , great idea.

Now I'm thinking ... they outsourced all the brainy stuff. Book keeping , computer programming , even computer repair. When these robots get going ... they're going to outsource the manual labor to.

We're gonna have dollar a day guys running a robot cleaning shopping centers and stuff. No need for high end artificial intellgence when you can hire a philipino for a dollar a day to sit in a booth on the other side of the world and do it.

so what does that leave for us ?

Does it leave anything for us , any job we can do to earn a living ?

Because you aint selling me your stereo and your nice computer if I can't hold down a job. Or if I only make a dollar a day.

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