Smart Systems Threaten More Jobs Than Outsourcing 251
fbform writes "A strategy consulting firm called Strategy Analytics has announced that outsourcing to India and other countries is a small threat compared to having IT jobs replaced by 'smart systems'. Quote from a different news-source: 'higher value-added jobs - involving identification, assessment, conclusions, decisions, and recommendations - will continue to be lost to systems with increasingly intelligent capabilities'." Such as this one.
I think we're safe (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maintenance? (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, ok, I don't speak English.
The other choice (Score:5, Interesting)
Jobs maintaining these creations will always exist, because they wouldn't be able to administer themselves.
"I view this in the same way as the first flight of the Wright brothers," Cohen said.
Such advancements eventually find there way into businesses, which means someday fewer jobs driving forklifts and delivery trucks.
Does this mean that the writer believes that air travel is a bad thing? Does anyone think that we should do a harder, slower, more expensive and less reliable way so that more people have jobs?
Technology threatens technologists the most. (Score:2, Interesting)
Truth is the technology threatens us computer geeks the most.
I have a book underneath a bunch of crap in the garage. "Unleashing Windows 98".
Some people spent weeks studying, learning about Windows 98 and master it. Who gives a shit about it now?
Everything you know, everything you think that you can do that is special will be done quicker and better by a 5 year old pressing a few bright buttons in a machine that you will end up designing and maintaining.
It's not so much that what you know will become obsolete, it will just get to the point were nobody gives a damn because it will become so easy to do.
Remember when ripping and playing mp3s was a hard thing to do?
Remember when people paid big bucks for a decent C compiler?! Now even MS gives them away free. Nobody cares except which compiler best suites your enviroment.
Who would pay you a hundred bucks for Emacs nowadays?
It's not that nobody cares, or your skills won't still be usefull. It's that everything you know, everything your doing on a computer today will be quant and obsolete to lusers and Grandmas everywere in 10-15 years.
People will be saying "What?! you must be joking your still using Windows XP?, Sweet jesus, Get with the program and install LinuxBSD 3.0 so we can get some real work done."
Remember when HTML coding was a skill that could get you a job on that alone?! HA.
I know this because of those 20 year experianced IBM mainframe programmers, administrators, and techs working next to me struggling to get some bitch's winmodem to dial up on her WinME box over a phone for 11 bucks an hour.
And I left those poor bastards long behind and soon somebody will do the same to me once I get comfortable that I "know enough to get the job done".
outsourcing is a load of bull (Score:2, Interesting)
Myth #3: Outsourcing will cause a net loss of 3.3 million jobs.
Fact: Outsourcing has little net impact, and represents less than 1 percent of gross job turnover.
Over the past decade, America has lost an average of 7.71 million jobs every quarter.[4] The most alarmist prediction of jobs lost to outsourcing, by Forrester Research, estimates that 3.3 million service jobs will be outsourced between 2000 and 2015--an average of 55,000 jobs outsourced per quarter, or only 0.71 percent of all jobs lost per quarter.
Myth #6: Outsourcing is a one-way street.
Fact: Outsourcing works both ways.
The number of jobs coming from other countries to the U.S. (jobs "insourced") is growing at a faster rate than jobs lost overseas. According to the Organization for International Investment, the numbers of manufacturing jobs insourced to the United States grew by 82 percent, while the number outsourced overseas grew by only 23 percent.[5] Moreover, these insourced jobs are often higher-paying than those outsourced.[6]
http://outsourcing.weblogsinc.com/entry/038852817
nsourcing growing at a faster rate than outsourcing
Posted Apr 11, 2004, 4:18 AM ET by Subramony S.
The New York Times is running an article on the benefits of insourcing and how it is growing at a much faster rate than outsourcing.
Proponents of free trade point to the near-record 6.4 million Americans who worked for foreign companies as of 2001, the last year for which complete figures were available. They also note that while more jobs are being outsourced than insourced, the number of new workers employed by foreign companies more than doubled during the 15 years ended in 2001. By comparison, the number that moved offshore - roughly 10 million, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis - grew by only 56 percent in the same period.
***
I'm tired of this myth of outsourcing hurting jobs and the US economy. for the most part, its only low level, low paying, entry level positions being outsourced to places like india. the outsourcing saves companies money so they can hire people in higher paying, mid-level positions. Read the links I posted. While currently we have more jobs outsources then insources, the rate if insourcing is increasing faster then the level of outsourcing. For those of you wondering, insourcing is foreign companies in the USA hiring USA workers.
Since these foreign companies are hiring USA workers, they are taking away jobs from workers in their native homeland. Isn't this not fair to workers in their native homeland? Shouldn't we deny business with these companies until they fire all of the USA workers and hire native homeland workers? Because, thats the attitude you have with companies outsourcing to india. it should play both ways, right?
Your job belongs to your employer, not you. Your employer exists to make money, not provide you with a job. To get a job, you must have certain skills/talnets that an employer wants. If you get laid off, its your own fault for putting al your eggs in one basket (all your skills in one trade). The problem is with YOU, not your employer.
hee, hee (Score:5, Interesting)
who would make technical illustrations by *manually*
deleting centerlines and such from AutoCAD drawings
before exporting the images. Said it was great
mindless work to rest his brain.
When I showed him how to turn off layers, his eyes
got huge. "Don't tell anybody that! We'll lose our
overtime!"
Computer Science and "Decisions". (Score:2, Interesting)
It used to be that a computers 'usefulness' was measured not in terms of MIPS, or Desktop Dominance, or "user base", but in terms of Decisions made.
Any successful branch of a computer program, determined by its Logic Design, is a "Decision".
Think "Yes" or "No" trees in any flow diagram: this was a "Decision".
IBM used to promote their machines as having "made 150,000 decisions a day". These weren't just program branches, but real business decisions - e.g. "Is this account overdue?" - Yes == one successful Decision. No == a Decision, etc.
I still think this is a pretty useful metric, since it equates to actual business use, not just "performance"...
GPS vs. Taxi Drivers.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Joseph Marie Jacquard's invention was fiercely opposed by the silk-weavers, who feared that its introduction, owing to the saving of labor, would deprive them of their livelihood. However, its advantages secured its general adoption, and by 1812 there were 11,000 looms in use in France. The loom was declared public property in 1806, and Jacquard was rewarded with a pension and a royalty on each machine.
Here's another example:
Our city currently has a shortage of 300+ tax drivers particularly during graveyard shifts. The taxi drivers union has proposed that cabs could be fitted with GPS and route-planning software, but the council refuses saying that any potential taxi drivers must pass the official exams (demonstrating their ability to have memorised "The Knowledge").
Introducing technology would create more jobs, and there is no danger of loss of earnings, since the council regulates the fares that taxis can charge.
Not if they use macs (Score:5, Interesting)
PCs in the workplace are what Robery Cringley (I, Cringley) calls the IT dept full employment act. At my own workplace where PC techs outneumber macs techs 20:1 even though the number of macs to PCs is closer to 1:5, they once tried to force everyone to adopt a common platform and guess which one they voted on?
My mac does have sick days occasionally, but I dont envy PC users. My Linux computers are all just servers. So they really dont get much stress from constantly installing applications or doing thinks that cause them to red-line their disk usage. Thus they are as solid as a rock and never go down (same is true of my g4 mac servers). However they do get out of date on their patches and I truly worry about all the services I might have turned on that I dont know about. I'm not a good enough sys admin to trust myself to know if say Apache needs certain port maping and RPC sevices so I cant just go turning everything off. My solution is to firewall them and get a better sys admin to stay on top of the needed patches.
while my macs also have some "extra" srevices turned on I'm reasonably assured they were designed in a coherent fashion. When I turn on off a service the firewall automaticall closes those ports too. Since mac packages dont (normally) spray install files all over your system into places like /etc /usr/ /opt /bin and /sbin it makes removing things really easy and prevents cruft build up. (this by the way is why I will not install that loathsome gnu-darwin package: it for example even replaces /bin/make !!!)
Maybe this is what they meant about smart systems replacing IT techs.
Marshall Brain has thought about this stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
Brain chose polar extremes for artistic purposes, and to peg the ends of the sociological spectrum, so it's more an exploration than a prediction. But it's a very interesting and worthwhile read. If automation does displace almost all jobs, I don't think the current legal and financial system will do much to protect those of us who aren't super-rich.
Automation could take my job (Score:2, Interesting)
However it's ironic that b/c it's a government position that "they" still prefer a warm and fuzzy body around just in case something does hit the fan.
Re:Maintenance? (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course I can't see this fully making a maintenance guy redundant, but it will most likely result in so few problems as for it to be uneconomical to support most people in that role.
Unemployment (Score:4, Interesting)
The sooner we realise that, and stop treating it as a problem, the better.
Re:This isn't silly (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure that distinction really exists
Well I'm afraid that in my attempt to avoid writing a huge treatise on economics, I used some pretty clumsy definitions.
The distinction I was trying to draw was between those who have to keep running to stay where they are, and those who can sit back and watch the money coming in. A small scale example would be landlords and tennants. Some pay rent, and some recieve it. In a very broad sense (but a real one also) we are all landlords or tennants within society. the factories and the farms are owned by groups that are small in comparison to the size of society as a whole.
And they then use that money to purchase and own things
The distinction is between buying a new pair of shoes, or investing in property or a company. Someone doing the former wasn't what I meant. Someone doing the latter is clawing their way out of the worker category and into the owner category. Although this example shows that the groups are not clear definitions that an actual person has to fall into or out of. I'm just modelling how society works at a higher level.
When you say that efficiencies benefit the owners, therefore the workers and therefore society, I disagree.
Benefiting society? Yes - you need another society to compare it with, but between one that has cars and one that has horses, you can see the disparity of power. (Of course you should consider things like quality of life etc.)
But workers? Messier. The benefit is traditionally the falling cost of goods. Plot that benefit on one line. the negative is the lowering reward for a worker's time. Plot that on another line. See where they cross? Now at what point does the balance become a bad one for the 'worker?'
I say that this point has been reached for the average person.
Re:what to do? (Score:5, Interesting)
But even the life of the have-nots will be better. The poorest beggar in the world today is safe from smallpox, which even the richest people died from in the past. And even a refrigerator box is better than whatever shelter a beggar could get a hundred years ago.
Do we become a socialist welfare state
Something like that. What made communism inviable was the fact that wealth is finite. When productivity increases enough, people start giving things away. We get "free" email accounts with 100Mb capacity because the investment per account is just $0.10. Food productivity is so high that the goverment must buy and stock some farming products to raise the price.
The future I see is one where few things will be valuable. Real estate is one of them. Corporations are trying to raise the value of intellectual property, but I think it's obvious they will fail in the long run. For a while, arts and sports will be valuable skills, until art becomes fully automated and anyone can become a super-athlete, thanks to medical progress. In the end, we will either have the ultimate communist state, where wealth is distributed evenly by law, or we will the ultimate feudalist state, where the only wealth is owning land, acquired by inheritance. But the poorest serf will have a much better standard of living than any of us has today.
Another viewpoint (Score:2, Interesting)
For many years, I enjoyed six to nine month backpacking trips. I did thruhikes of major trails, wandered at whim through the national forests of America, and enjoyed what I considered a happy way of life. I had to work only few months over winter to finance these activities.
Others prefer overbuilt houses, accumulation of material objects, or whatever else they desire. They have made a choice, and tied their lives to the whims of their employer.
Only a few people share my tastes in living. I know there is a price to be paid for participating in our materialistic culture. Few people that I have met are aware of how much they give up.
Give me a break (Score:2, Interesting)
These are the jobs that are being automated and replaced by machines, because people don't want to do them and its cheaper then paying people. (Repetitive, mind dulling, stinky, work)
If you enjoy doing your work, (Not the paycheck, but the work itself) no machine is going to take your job away, because no machine will do a better job.
There are of course exceptions to this, as there are to everything.
Re:This isn't silly (Score:2, Interesting)
According to the US bureau of Economic Analysis, REAL per-capita disposable income has risen EVERY SINGLE YEAR SINCE 1949. Check the data yourself: http://econstats.com/grplist1.htm#nipa
So not only has our society benefited by the reduced cost of living that comes with cheaper products, it has benefited by the increased purchasing power of every citizen.
Look at the facts, not some trite manifesto printed in the 1800s.
How can you not see the irony of your whole argument? YOU ARE POSTING TO AN INTERNET SITE ABOUT THE EVILS OF TECHNOLOGY!
Any information worker in the US today who complains about the evils of technology should be sent to a third world country where they can see the benefits of living without it first hand.
Obligatory links (Score:2, Interesting)
Homeostatic systems (Score:3, Interesting)
This is generally true of systems humans have built in the past, but is not true of complex systems in general. For example: human bodies are some of the most complex systems that exist, and they essentially maintain themselves.
Once humans get better at designing homeostatic systems, something which major firms like IBM are working towards with their "autonomous computing" initiative, we'll see the amount of people required to maintain complex systems plummet.