
Richard Baldwin on the “inhumanely fast” next phase of globalization - smb111
https://qz.com/1642691/richard-baldwin-on-the-inhumanely-fast-next-phase-of-globalization/
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ZhuanXia
I remember reading Average is Over and A Fairwell to Alms just when I first
started working. They convinced me that labour power was going to decline
precipitously. I stared saving 60+% of everything I made and putting it into
index funds. Anyone making a good salary should attempt the same. Much of
white collar work is extremely amenable to automation, much more than even
truck
driving:[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox)

Maybe comparative advantage will save the day, but I think it is a really good
idea to start accumulating capital, even at today’s valuations.

~~~
ryanmarsh
Being a consultant with clients in a wide range of industries I concur. Most
of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be automated
with a few days or weeks of programmer effort. They are one successful
software project from losing their jobs. Lucky for them their companies are
terrible at shipping software.

Conversely, automating the work of a plumber would require a massive
investment in AI and robotics.

Also, nobody makes a robot that can be trusted to repaint the trim in my house
unattended.

~~~
maxxxxx
"Most of the employees I come into contact with have jobs that could be
automated with a few days or weeks of programmer effort."

After looking at some of the business processes at my company I am not so sure
about this anymore. There are a lot of jobs that are pretty mundane but when
you look a little closer most of the processes have a lot of exceptions where
the employee makes decisions that don't follow the process exactly. From what
I have seen it's really hard to come up with a recipe that can be 100%
automated because of all these exceptions. It seems to me that humans are a
buffer that sometimes corrects unforeseen things and without that buffer the
organization would do stupid things.

~~~
cosmodisk
This is often a process issue more than anything else. For instance, our
finance team spends insane amounts of time dealing with a variety of invoices
with varying information and structure.There are a number of exceptions, rules
and etc. However what's often ignored,is the fact that we are much bigger than
any of our supplier and it would be pretty easy to convince them to invoice us
the way we want instead the way they want. With some clever automations, I
could easily replace a couple of my colleagues with software, however I would
not be in a better situation at all,so no point of doing it.

~~~
ryanmarsh
This is a great example. I automated away the jobs of a few people at a
transportation company that had a few large clients that expected to be
invoiced in particular ways with additional documentation.

We put together a document imaging solution to gather all the relevant docs
from all loads and made the pickiest customer the default for all invoices and
automated the entire system. Instead of laying those people off though, we
focused them on calling on unpaid invoices which greatly helped accounts
receivable.

Similarly, at an oil and gas company we took the better of several business
processes, molded them into one optimized process, automated it, and after a
dip in the price of oil and layoffs many jobs were never rehired for.

At both of these places the leadership saw the value of getting the software
right, hired for it, and we got the job done. I estimate the oil & gas company
saved themselves $1 Billion over the next 10 years.

~~~
cosmodisk
The only thing I don't like about these situations is how little money the
developers get for doing things like this. Any other profession would be
rolling in money after bringing such savings,yet the developers end up getting
pennies ( relatively).

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crazygringo
> _Q: Several studies show technology will disrupt jobs, but they also argue
> that almost as many jobs will be created._

> _A: There’s a mismatch of job displacement and job creation. Job
> displacement is being driven at the speed of digital technology, which is
> explosive at this moment. And displacement is the business model for the AI
> geniuses and all those companies. All of them are hoping to get rich by
> displacing workers, not by creating jobs. Creating jobs is much slower. So,
> at least in the next few years, the displacement will outstrip the creation.
> But it’s not the direction of travel which is wrong. It’s just a mismatch of
> speed._

Citation needed. There's zero evidence that "creating jobs is slower." People
have been saying this every year for well over a century, and yet unemployment
is quite low right now in the US.

It's one of those things that seems logical -- but all evidence is to the
contrary. And it's probably because it's a lot easier for the human brain to
spot a huge loss of jobs in one industry, than a small increase across many
industries that adds up to the same size.

Also, the jobs can _already exist_ but just not be filled. We don't
necessarily need to wait for them to be "created".

~~~
nosianu
Okay... so now also include in your statement the quality of those new jobs.
Not how many electronic gadgets people can buy compared to 50 years ago, but
how stressed they are and how they fit into greater society. Also include how
useful many jobs feel to those working in them - reference to "Dilbert jobs"
(or Wally jobs, if you like and how common the feeling seems to be that ones
job is useless (I myself certainly had quite a few high-paying (IT) freelancer
jobs - the ones where you would expect more rigour before the position is
created - where I had clear evidence that the job was completely useless, but
it's hard to decline 6-figure income for half a year when society punishes you
if you do that).

I don't see the point in making an argument when it's only based on "there is
a(ny) job". Here where I live now the bureaucrats can trim the number of
jobless by putting them into temporary and mostly useless training programs.
Useless according not to me but to any analysis ever published in (the major)
news media in my country. Also, the number of people working for worker-lease
companies instead of being "direct employees" has increased may times over the
last two decades. Part of making the workforce "more flexible". Now they have
less pay, are sent around the country much more often and can't establish
themselves in one place (or have a family life where they are away all week
and have stressful weekend travel to and from the places of work) - but sure,
"flexibility" is up. It does not matter if the families those people create
will have much less happy kids - as long as the _total numbers_ still look
alright. Right?If you "migrate" a job from a stable decades-long factory job
to being an Uber driver, 1 == 1 so it's all the same on the bottom line?

~~~
crazygringo
Sorry, but you should look at what jobs used to be like.

Back-breaking work on the farm. Mind-numbing and body-destroying assembly line
work that could cut off your hand. Construction work without any of the safety
standards we now have. Alcohol consumption and tobacco smoking was sky-high.

Any way you slice it, the quality of jobs today is tremendously higher than in
the past, and people are _not_ being paid less.

True, job tenure is no longer as long-term as it used to be, and probably
doesn't come with a pension, but the flip side is that it's also never been
easier to _find_ a job and leave a bad one, and you can manage your own 401(k)
that won't disappear if your employer goes bankrupt.

~~~
megaremote
> Any way you slice it, the quality of jobs today is tremendously higher than
> in the past, and people are not being paid less.

Really? What about 40 years ago? Jobs were a lot easier, and you could buy a
house and raise a family on one income. Why do you ignore that period of time,
when workers had it good?

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roca
My problem with this take is that people --- including me! --- have been
predicting this for decades because the logic just seems so clear, yet
unemployment is still low and long-term real wages have not declined, in fact
around the world and in most wealth bands they have risen dramatically.

I don't think there's some benevolent cosmic law that ensures job creation
will always match job destruction, so I can't assume these dire predictions
will never come true. But after so many years crying wolf it's hard to take
them seriously until macroeconomic indicators show they're happening.

~~~
nostrademons
People usually underestimate the capacity of the population to adapt. The
changes described here have been operating for decades. Motivated, mentally-
healthy people with strong community support can usually enter a new career in
2-4 years. You get a recession and lots of angsting as people mentally accept
the new reality, and then they get jobs within that new reality (which just
gets destroyed again in another 10-15 years).

When people _haven 't_ been able to adapt, results are every bit as tragic as
people predicted. Think of the large swaths of Appalachia or the Midwest that
are still smarting from our transition away from a coal & steel economy.

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Animats
This guy is straining to get his new words to become memes.

"Globotics". "Telemigration". Please. Companies have been outsourcing call
centers to India for decades now. That trend seems to have peaked; outside of
telemarketing, the lower cost isn't worth the lower performance.

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duality
I stopped reading when he said IBM Watson was somehow key in this "globotics"
revolution. Even IBM seems to have stopped advertising Watson.

~~~
orev
Given where Watson is now, the fact that systems mostly only get better, and
all the other advances in AI, I think it’s safe to say that it will get
better. He could also be using Waston as a general example of AI that might be
relevant to a wider audience.

~~~
notfromhere
Watson isn't a thing, it's just fancy words for their army of low-paid
consultants. I worked for a competitor and everyone largely decided Watson
wasn't anything to worry about.

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hugh4life
The next phase of globalization is the devaluation of fossil fuels and
agriculture commodities making whole countries economies untenable leading
towards mass migration far more extreme than the recent past...

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thrwayxyz
The people most worried about AI are the ones not working on it. We don't know
how to initialise a simple feed forward neural network yet let alone train it
efficiently. It will be centuries before the theory catches up with the
proctice. Until then we might as well be monks cross pollinating plants
worried about genetic modification.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Likely gross pessimism. We went from clockwork to million-transitor computers
in the last 100 years (most of that in the last 25). How long before we hit a
billion? A trillion? How long before we hit on the same trick nature blindly
hit upon, to initialize her neural networks?

~~~
jodrellblank
We hit a billion transistors in a CPU in about 2010, ten billion in 2015, and
now some pass twenty-three billion.

In GPUs, a billion transistors in 2009, twenty-one billion in 2017.

In FGPAs, a billion in 2004 and fifty billion in 2018.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count)

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jessriedel
Given that the global poor gaining jobs are statistically much worse off than
those losing them, I'd say it's inhumanely slow...

~~~
crazygringo
That's just factually untrue.

First-world workers aren't losing jobs in aggregate at all. They're not
statistically worse off at all. (Unfortunately median income hasn't been
_improving_ , but it certainly hasn't been getting meaningfully _worse_.)

While the global poor are experiencing massive benefits lifting them out of
poverty.

I fail to see what is inhumane here.

~~~
jessriedel
You misinterpret. I'm not claiming that the effect of globalization is making
the global poor worse off than they were before, or the first-world workers
better off than they were before. I am saying the global poor are _starting_
much worse off and, even after benefiting from globalization, _remaining_
worse off than first-world workers.

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dfilppi
Jobs are an undesirable side effect of a business, not the goal. With or
without globalism, that is and always will be true.

~~~
magpi3
Maybe to the business. But jobs are a very desirable side effect for the
nation state that makes the laws that make a business possible.

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HillaryBriss
_By trying to be more flexible with work, you thought you were getting control
of your life. You could come home and take care of the kids while handling a
few emails. But you actually arranged it so you ended up out of work because a
telemigrant took your job for much less._

I keep thinking about the age-old discussion about why the tech industry
doesn't just move away from Silicon Valley to a location with a low cost of
living. And the answer usually involves the existence of a critical mass of
highly effective potential employees, of a cluster economy. There really are
some jobs whose pay rates do not matter. _But not all that many._ All the rest
will sooner or later be vulnerable to global outsourcing/telemigration.

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balt_s
> Globalization always means more opportunities for the nation’s most
> competitive citizens, but more competition for the least competitive
> citizens. The trouble is that in the services sector there are a lot of
> uncompetitive people.

This will end well.

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TACIXAT
I'm curious how long the world will take to normalize all nations. China
cannot be the world's factory forever. China seems to be setting Africa up for
a similar position as it rises. What happens when we run out of poorer
countries to make stuff? Do we bring that home? Prices will surely need to go
up in the case of domestic labor. I'm super curious how this will unfold.

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hnnnnnnngggggg
I think what many authors/technologists like Mr. Baldwin overlook are the
impacts of Data Privacy and Locality laws will have on automation efforts
described in this article.

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ww520
Haven't Mechanical Turks been there for a while? I wonder how much impact it
has had on the white collar work force.

~~~
jotm
I used it for a while... Found it really sad what some people in the US will
do for 50 cents (~20min of work)...

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m0llusk
Jobs are essentially slavery and ditching them should be good for everyone.
All we need to do is build a society that meets the basic needs of the
population. We already have some tools and ideas to experiment with. Mourning
the old order won't bring it back or delay change, only complicate this
transition.

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Ericson2314
It's looking more like work is becoming pointless but society still makes us
do it. I would hope UBI speeds up automation.

In particular AI sucks, but virtually integrated expert systems don't. Too bad
they have a hard time emerging under capitalism. Because your supply chain is
always insanely stupid mega rent seekers.

Maybe some aquiponics megaco-op can ensure its automation engineers don't
starve, which will be to socialism what the loom was to industrial capitalism.
Get on it Mondragon.

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turk73
Not buying it, sorry. Maybe some jobs, but all this nonsense about automation
taking over everything is purely to sow FUD and for no other reason.

Oh, automatic trucks, yeah, probably not. That's going to be really hard to
pull off because the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a
toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously. Same with drones--the
first one that crashes into a house and causes a fire that kills a whole
family is going to force them to reconsider their idiotic plans. It doesn't
matter how you design the things because the tech isn't what is important.

As far as replacing the software engineering work I do with "freelancers" is a
sure way to put my whole company out of business. If there were any
freelancers out there who could assist us we would have already hired them. We
don't want "freelancers" we want people who will be around to build up
institutional knowledge and perform because they know our company and our
data. As it is, our office in India is about 30% as efficient as the one on
the US, and that whole experiment has already been running for almost two
decades. It's not just the timezones, it's just the whole nature of the job.
We have people with 15-20 years of experience working with us. It's just too
naive a picture to say "globotics" which is just a made up word--even says so
in the article. If you want good outcomes in a corporation, it would be wise
to hire good people and not just stock up on human cattle.

~~~
HillaryBriss
> the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the
> liability is going to rise tremendously

Human driven trucks kill people now and have done so for decades. IMHO, the
liability comparison that will matter, the one that regulators, insurance
companies, the courts and the market will eventually embrace will instead be:
are automatic trucks as safe or just a little bit safer than human driven
trucks?

~~~
maxxxxx
It's not that easy. The whole legal system is based on finding the party to
blame. With human drivers it's the driver or maybe the company but if
something with an automated truck happens who do you blame? I am sure
companies would love to be able to hide behind an automated system.

~~~
HillaryBriss
Maybe this will turn out false, but I predict the legal system will blame
whoever has the deepest pockets, just like when there's an accident with human
driven trucks. And the suits will be settled in a way that _does_ raise the
cost of doing business, to your point. But I predict it won't be severe enough
to kill the business outright.

