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168 sats \ 2 replies \ @TheBTCManual 2 Mar
If this trend continues I wonder what it does to certain economies like the Phillippines and India which have a major stake in the customer service game, and how far does it shrink that?
Obviously, there still have to be people around reviewing logs and making sure bots don't go nuts and hand out refunds and there will be people who want to speak to a human (could even become a paid option) but how much of those salaries now migrate to data center revenue instead?
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @gmd 2 Mar
Not good. I just came from visiting the Philippines and so much of the economy seems to revolve around retail and service industry. It seems almost every city block has rows of small shanty stores and restaurants all selling the same cheap goods and services.
There is a surplus of college grads relative to quality white collar jobs. These types of gigs are very lucrative opportunities for the English speaking grads.
Of course they will say we are "freeing them up to do more creative work". Unfortunately like in every developing country there are already millions with the extra bandwidth but no opportunity... IMO we will only see things further concentrate power and widen the gaps between haves/have-nots.
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99 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 2 Mar
For sure those jobs also bring much-needed foreign currency into the country that helps stablise the peso and drive spending as these call center staff spend their money in their local economies. If it dries up, that's a lot of US dollars leaving their local FX market too.
Indeed it will drive wealth concentration, even if they had access to markets, I don't think the person working those jobs or people who benefit downstream from that income now are going to be like oh well better get some Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA stock to offset it if they can even afford to do it.
Transitions are always painful, and people will always get left behind, but markets do adapt, I have no idea where many of the service worker labour will go now though
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