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From a recent article in The Economist. It turns out that once again many of the jobs that people predicted would be eliminated by AI have instead received a boost, at least for now. This closely follows another recent report on how Indian BPO firms are surprisingly thriving due to AI.

"Moreover, AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models or supervising AI agents. Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. Mr Gallimore says more “high-value” work, such as accountancy or engineering, is going offshore in part because “AI is a leveller. You can now teach someone complex stuff quickly” and still get it done more cheaply than in America or Europe. Some of this is done at so-called global capability centres, captive back offices that are booming in India and also now growing in the Philippines."

It seems like AI has incidentally commoditized the complement (procedural knowledge), and in turn created greater demand for inputs like human judgement and "empathy".

> It seems like AI has incidentally commoditized the complement (procedural knowledge), and in turn created greater demand for inputs like human judgement and "empathy".

I think as well there is currently the following: AI still needs an operator, in the same way than a bulldozer needs a bulldozer operator. And like with bulldozer, there are always something that business stakeholder wanna dig, now that digging is faster.

“Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. Mr Gallimore says”

How is this HIPPA compliant? Please tell me there’s an aspect of HIPPA that requires sensitive data to be only accessed and processed by Americans on shore. You’d think the multiples we pay on health care for worse outcomes would at least be supporting our own domestic middle class with this sort of basic back office white collar work

This is already common for both HIPAA and financial data, it usually comes down to the offshoring site meeting compliance guidelines and functioning like a "clean room" with data leak prevention in place

Also though, I don't think there is anything inherently less secure about a Filipino handling my data than an America

I visited India recently and when I saw just how many companies have a GCC there I was mindblown. Lots of cool offices, engineering and technical roles, great work life balance and generally a different vibe. Literally every company that I could recognise had a back office there.
Do these GCC's have great work life balance? They may be better that the service companies, and may pay better, but WLB is shitty everywhere in India as far as I can tell. As an example, the death of Ernest & Young employee Anna Sebastian sparked a lot of discussion in Indian media since it was attributed to work pressure.[1] Another example I recently heard was a USA Texas based company called CorroHealth suddenly closing shop and laying off 800+ employees in India, the employees allege it was retaliation for asking for overtime payment since they were being made to work till 10 pm.[2]

If you are an American or European with colleagues in India, and if they are working or attending meetings after regular work hours, they don't have good WLB. Given a choice, I doubt they would want to attend the late night meetings. Life in India is already like playing a video game in hard mode, and yet we have to work lot more hours for lot less pay, and be regularly told how shitty offshoring work is.

[1]https://www.news18.com/viral/26-year-old-ey-pune-employee-su...

[2]https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/it-employe...

> but WLB is shitty everywhere in India as far as I can tell

This was what I believed, then I saw how pretty much ALL of my friends at Fortune 100s or 500s and they were amazing. I am sure awful companies exist and the bar for what is good WLB can be lowered by these, but the whole "it is bad everywhere" was simply not true and I felt I had a distorted vision of my Indian friends until I actually visited a lot of them.

My so works at a reinsurance company in one of these GCCs, and her WLB is unmatched. Hours are really flexible. Has a really great manager and team. She even gets to take a day off every month as menstrual leave.

> work lot more hours for lot less pay,

This depends, while the vast majority of roles pay "market rate" there is a strange sweet spot where roles pay a significant amount considering purchasing power and cost of living.

What's a GCC?
> great work life balance

Oh dear

Yeah, paradoxically Indian software outsourcing is growing. I guess the way the companies are thinking about this is we need some sort of human oversight for all the work the LLMs are doing, might as well pay someone the least amount possible to do that.
Don't understand why this should not have been obvious. If you have technology that allows expensive workers to do things cheaper why wouldn't same technology allow cheaper workers to do stuff even cheaper... And cheap is good...
Indian tech sector has seen rapid decline; the Indian outsourcing model is obsolete.

I can now translate tasks that can be easily split to low cost regions, and not have to deal with the cultural issues of India. I can also rapidly generate work of similar (and improving) quality... I have no use for a meat-proxy to a llm.

I expect a severe crash in the Indian tech sector, before a minute proportion of the workers can start to build it up again.

I’m not sure if this is true. I really want the hiring story to be true, but the responses I am getting from people on the ground vs industry generated reports isn’t meeting up.

The only report that I know of that is available is the ICRIER report.

I haven’t read the report itself, but it’s supposed to show modest hiring growth.

Conversely I know that most of the outsourcing vendors are seeing reductions in headcount when it comes to outsourced tech operations.

> Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools

So, insurance claims are handled by people who operate in different legal system and by unaccountable undererministic system. And people are pressured to perform fast.

This is not about "automating complex task". This is about "create accountability sink for fraud we want them to do and create system that will perform said fraud".

The insurance company is still liable in US courts for products or services sold in the US, just like any other business is liable regardless of where or who does the work.

Also, pretty sure denial of coverage letters have to be endorsed by US licensed doctors and pharmacists, at least in any half decent state.

We have moved some "low cost" work from India to other reigons, now that translation is improved...

At the same time, we are reducing the proportion of outsourced work, because a local team with LLMs are dramatically more capable... There so many benefits to how you can organize a smaller high-skill team. I would put a 10-man team with the current tooling on par with a 10 high skill + 80 low cost heads even 5 years ago.

Ooph, now the AI will be wrong and the human won't know it. And that's running our... let me see... life saving care. Cool. cool. cool.
"Computer says no" has been a trope of terrible customer service long before AI.
Has anything really changed for transparency?
Your average devs are wrong more than the AI is at this point.
People have a bad intuition about economic mechanisms, but that does not mean that AI won't cause huge regressive effects.

The transition from independent artisans to factory work didn't cause massive unemployment. But it cause the former artisans to lose out, because they no longer had the bargaining power they had before - their work was now a commodity. This resulted in "Engel's pause", a period in which wages stagnated, and so conditions got worse because prices also increased.

But AI also isn't just automation. It's the automation of automation. You may think that you will just level up and learn the new skill set of managing AIs, but the AI companies will be collecting the data to automate that too. Often by watching you.

Also worth pointing out Anthropic is a sponsor of The Economist. Probably muddies the water some more.
A "sponsor"? As in buys some ads? The Economist's take on AI is hardly uncritical.
This makes no sense outside of SV.

If you work in the broader corporate world, your heads-down work may typically be writing software, but you're really more like staff IT. You get promoted into some kind of management role like "architect" and end up owning all the implementation instead of just the code.

You get passed the football a lot because that's more effective teamwork. You have weight in meetings because the business is smart enough to realize you are not just writing code. Your maintenance is basically all the operations short of the accounting and client manager stuff for that project.

AI is irrelevant unless you're really feeling a time crunch and have little alternative. Nobody cares how you do it. The meetings are a way bigger deal than the code. These types of devs are the equivalent of a bureaucrat who can sign off on a construction job and then grab a shovel.

This is the actual "future" of dev work... ahem it looks a lot like the past and present for everyone else.

> AI is basically irrelevant unless you're really feeling a time crunch and have little alternative

Which is all of our industry. You're lucky if you're in a pocket outside of timr crunch.

Also an analogy with the globalization of manufacturing era. People have I think been prone to assuming that the West has a "magic ingredient" which entitles it to revenues from skilled work forever. A presumption that people overseas, especially in the "south" and "east", wouldn't acquire the same skills or culture. The idea that it is so absolutely critical to software development to be in an office in Silicon Valley that it's worth paying enormous premiums even relative to the rest of America and the West (+).

That is being disrupted. Ironically, by American AI firms who want a cut of all software engineering salaries globally.

(+) UK software developer working for an American multinational here, aware that my salary is "great by UK standards but not by American ones"

The WFH aficionados that emerged during Covid had no concept of bargain power or power structures.

Dunno why there was such resistance from the owning class afterwards with return to office mandates.

The only crime here is stopping before AI replaces the CEOs and politicians.
They should go first tbh, but the system we've allowed them to create mean they'll go last. The same is true of mass redundancies etc. And even when they do go there's golden handshakes/parachutes etc involved. No real skills apart from going to business school and having the right social circle, most of em.
Personally I find AI simultaneously powerful and fatiguing. Hiring someone else to use AI is honestly pretty great.
Why wouldn't it? The Philippines has a large talent pool of English-speaking workers who can do tons of different IT-related functions that AI can't remotely replace.

If you have a globally distributed sales team with no single office for example with people throughout APAC, the Philippines is the unquestionable place to hire for IT support roles for that region.

Outside the English-speaking world, there's generally been a knowledge gap when it comes to programming. Better resources weren't being shared, and AI helps bridge that gap. You could learn the basics, but higher-quality materials were hard to come by. AI actually solves that—so people's reactions depend a lot on their environment

Even learning through open source participation requires understanding the English speaking culture, and that's a kind of knowledge that only people who have lived in those countries can really grasp.

In my case, most of my knowledge came from Microsoft's learning center materials. To actually learn deeply, I had to read papers. And I only knew about them because I went to graduate school. But there were already many libraries that made it easier to apply that knowledge without reading the papers directly.

So I think how useful AI is depends a lot on where you live and what kind of environment you're in

YT videos from Philippines would disagree.
People love to complain.
Do you mind sharing a link to one of these videos?
What YT videos?
About working conditions in Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGOs) also known as scamming centers?
YouTube
Somebody's got to actually operate those robots, after all
I think offshoring to the Phillipines is extremely net-positive from a purely utilitarian sense

I know a lot of Filipinos and essentially 100% of them in white-collar work are using the money to support their extended families. The money gets spent in a very different way than a Westerner would use it

So why won't they just relocate us en masse to Manila so that a customer from an English locale can speak to someone speaking proper English while I enjoy local pancit, lumpia and stinky tuyo during lunch?
You're only saying this because you're in the fortunate position of not worrying about your job being offshored.
Why does anyone owe you a job if someone elsewhere can do it as good or better and more economically. What entitles you to work simply because you are based in the West?

Sounds like a skill issue

Overall it seems we don't have good intuitions for what kinda work AI 'displaces'. Years of hand-wringing about programmers being put out of a job and instead programmers are the ones paying $200/mo for LLMs

And on the flipside a lot of AI vendor ideas like helping doctors turn voice transcripts into notes has just been annoying for the prospective user--they feel they may as well type it up themselves if they then have to review and correct the AI notes

any links passing through the pay wall ?