Brains Asa Cheap Commodity

CheapLabor everywhere in developed worlds. Is globalization and automation devaluing the human mind and education?

BrainsAsaCheapCommodity. The BigPicture is that LifeIsCheapAndGettingCheaper.

Asia is fond of cranking out large masses of low-wage college graduates the way that Henry Ford found to crank out cars. As bandwidth becomes less and less expensive, remote work may also cut into everything from burger flipping to butlers, not just scientists and technology.

Devaluing from which previous value? The value assigned a Madison Avenue advertising agency exec's mind in the 1950s? The value assigned a Russian serf's mind in 1600? The value assigned a hunter/gatherer's mind 60,000 years ago? Some average of all historic human mind values (weighted by population perhaps)?

Devaluing the 3 or 4 minutes when people could actually make a good living with their mind. Nice while it lasted.

That's 3 or 4 minutes when a few wealthy people in wealthy countries could make a good living with their mind.

I don't think outsourcing is necessarily an either/or situation in terms of who gets the job. But, that's another discussion.

Good old nationalistic fervor and AmericanCulturalAssumption comes back to haunt wiki. Of course, the guys who post here probably own Japanese made cars or good old German cars. Or at least that's what you see in the big parking lots around cubicle farms in California. American cars are a minority. If we consider it acceptable to import Japanese cars, why the hell is it not acceptable to import Indian software?

Therefore this much ado about nothing is dismissed.

What we need is a mutual trade deal between car makers and software makers: you don't cheapify our career and we won't cheapify yours. It used to be that manufacturing was seen as a dead-end field anyhow and that there were plenty of alternatives if one just got some education. However, if brains are a cheap commodity, there are not very many places to move "up" to next for techies. It is hard to feel sorry for somebody if there are plenty of alternatives, but that changes when the alternatives diminish. The NextBigThing is late and the US is turning into MarketingLand?, where no real work is done. Getting a big fat cheap SUV is not one of my priorities anyhow.

I always wondered what would happen to our society when AI finally became viable. However, we may be seeing a similar result even before AI. Cheap global communication is making it practical to have remote people do a lot of "brain work" for pennies. Soon we will probably have "Mars rovers" vacuuming the house, being controlled from places such as Ethiopia. Who needs AI when there are 5 billion human brains eager for a little money in exchange for some remote work?

We are witnessing the beginnings of a huge change.

-- top

This is probably going to sound horrible. A friend of mine once suggested that you could build a pretty good and cheap super computer by building a gigantic grid-layout in China and paying people the prevailing wage to behave as elements in a FSM. I think he underestimated the expense and utility of this, but it certainly expresses the idea of using human brains as commodity computing devices.

{{an idea that appears in VernorVinge's "A Deepness In The Sky", ISBN 0812536355 }}

Doesn't pass the smell test. Assuming each person in the whole world (let's not limit ourselves to China) could execute 10 state-transitions per second (well beyond the capability of most humans) times a population of around 6 billion (may be higher; but much of the world's population are children incapable of this) is 60 billion transitions a second.

A small cluster of PCs could do equally well. Given a few more years of MooresLaw, we'll probably have PDAs that can execute faster. And without the massive infrastructure required. :)

Brainpower may be a useful commodity; but it's utterly wasted if employed to emulate a FiniteStateMachine.

Hm. A "brain grid" is an interesting idea, but it would need to leverage what humans were good at - say pattern recognition, critical thought, social modeling, etc.

A more practical, real-world example. Suppose you want a database of all the phone numbers in the U.S. At present, there are two ways to get it. The first is to buy a license from a Regional Bell Operating Company at great expense and with the aid of a team of lawyers. The second is to buy a copy of each phone book published in the U.S. and ship them to India to be scanned and proofed page-by-page. The second way is much cheaper, and it's how nearly all such databases are created.

Outsourcing jobs, including programming jobs, seems kind of inevitable in that context, doesn't it?

I'm not sure. The only reason the job of creating this particular database is outsourced is that current regulatory practices in the U.S. provide a disincentive for the Bells to sell their phone number database, so the license fees and other hurdles are unreasonable. This is not the InvisibleHand at work. This circumstance transforms what would be a data format conversion job performed by a small team of programmers or DBAs into a monumental data entry task handled by an army of low-skill workers.

Ah, and another example. My mother is a medical transcriptionist. She pays a courier to drive to the offices of the doctors she works for. They pick up cassette tapes of the doctor speaking his notes about patient visits and deliver them to my mom at home. She sits at a desk and listens to the tapes and types everything the doctor says, word for word, correcting grammar here and there and spelling multisyllabic medical jargon, and she gets paid something like 20 cents per line for this. (I think if I were a doctor, I'd just type it myself, but to each his own). In a lot of large hospitals, medical transcription is outsourced to commercial providers who themselves may outsource to typists overseas. Similar to the phone number database example, this is essentially an enormous data entry task. Meanwhile, work is underway to automate transcription with voice recognition software. So, the story of medical transcription may well be the story of monumental data entry tasks moving from domestic workers to offshore workers to domestic programmers to offshore programmers.

[Content moved to HumanVoiceRecognitionSystem]

Wikis make use of a network of brains, as compared to a moderated forum. Through donations of brainpower, text here is spell checked, grammar checked and undesirable stuff filtered. Most of the time, these donated brain resources are more than adequate to do the job.

Ahhhh!!! Wiki is a ConsensualMatrix!!!!

You wish...that would be nice. More often it's more like Usenet: permanent non-consensus

Participation is the consensual part. The conflict is at a different level.

Usenet does seem like a consensual non-consensus, riddled with noise & spam (non-consensual consensus)

And we all remember that earlier, computers were actually a bunch of people in a room doing addition/subtraction steps to calculate bomb drop tables, right?

But it was machines that replaced that, not billions of people earning 50-cents an hour. Perhaps if we'd had access to that back then, nobody would have bothered to invent the computer. Just offshored the calculations to Timbuckistan or the like.

I remember reading somewhere where one company offshored both their clerical and programming projects at the same time. They decided to scrap one of the in-progress programming projects because they figured it was cheap enough to do some of the clerical processes manually over their that they didn't need to automate it.

Outsourcing military calculations is risky, especially since there are advantages to getting it done quickly. I expect they'd still have developed electronic computers, they just wouldn't have developed into common, multi-purpose tools. That said, there's no doubt cheap labor stifles technology. The Greeks and Romans had the beginnings of steam power, and never had incentive to make anything useful with it. Life was much cheaper back then.

I was wondering about some of the wiki spam that appears from time to time. It is hard to believe that it is cost effective to bother creating such spam and placing it in wiki's, which don't have a very big audience and whose audience is tired of spam anyhow. After all, if we want penis pills, porn, and lower mortgage rates, we know pleeeeenty of places on the web to find them.

But then it occurred to me that perhaps this effort is happening overseas where the labor rates may make it cost effective. We may see more problems such as this due to low cost of hiring overseas hackers and spammers.

WikiSpammers are not spamming the members of this wiki, they are spamming Google.

China Labor rates in perspective

See Just How Cheap is Chinese Labor? at http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/dec2004/nf2004122_6762_db039.htm.

"If Wal-Mart were an individual economy, it would rank as China's eighth-biggest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Australia and Canada," http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-11/29/content_395728.htm ( BrokenLink )

Although above information is not scoped by "brainy types", there are still benefits from these awareness [?]. There must be some reasons why China win over India in the manufacturing sector. I hear India is importing from China as well.

India is more socialistic than China in an economic sense. Thus, there is more bureaucracy in setting up factories and paying workers. If the Chinese knew English as well as India, I am sure they would out-compete in the software sector also.

I once had a PointyHairedBoss who was negotiating salary with me. He said "You know Peter, brains are a dime a dozen. I can go out and buy ...blah blah blah". As he agreed to the figure I wanted, I thought it strange that he was saying that to me, when all I ever did was play with his machines, and he just kept pouring money at me. I would gladly have done it for subsistence at the time. -- PeterLynch

It's a negotiating strategy to get you to accept less money. Since you would gladly have done it for far less, that means he gave you far less than he was prepared to, had you been a strong negotiator. I figure that means that what you would have accepted was approximately the square root of the maximum he would have given you. :-)

It could be considered an AlarmBellPhrase hinting that you may be working for an a-hole.

Regarding the book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573223085/

Excerpt from an Amazon review:

The title of the book is very appropriate. For the age that we are in, we need a whole new mind. However, the book promised a mansion, but ended up giving us an apartment....To the author's credit, he is the first that succinctly diagnosed the major problems the Western countries are facing: Abundance, Asia, and Automation....There are several major shortcomings to the book....First and foremost, these six R-Directed aptitudes are not the sole possessions of the Western countries. Asian countries have them, too....This author has a dangerous underestimation of foreigners... [emph. added]

It seems everybody is seeing the problem now, but the solutions are nebulous or over-simplistic. Unlike the past obsolescents threats, the alternatives are not so clear anymore. I don't see a mass demand for creativity and high-end analysis. If anything, bosses want to do that all themselves. There is already an over-supply of opinions and ideas; People even give them away on the web for free (such as c2-wiki). And, education is becoming a mere prerequisite instead of a comparative advantage.

On Slashdot somebody pointed out that the cost of a degree in the western world can be more than the entire life earnings of a similarly-degreed person in a low-wage country. This alone puts those in the "developed world" at an economically competitive disadvantage even if they are great after they get their degree.

Some Asian cultures seem obsessed with education and grades. There's a joke among Asian-Americans that USA grades have the following meaning in an Asian family:

A+ - you get desert A - you get dinner B - Beating C - Cannot sit down due to sore bum D - Dungeon F - Family disowns you

Other variations on this exist.

An article suggesting that understanding business more important than understanding tech:

http://www.computerworld.com/careertopics/careers/story/0,10801,104355,00.html?SKC=careers-104355

CategoryEmployment, CategoryOffShore