Machines Replace Humans

Just reading an article by Doug Saunders about how humans are being replaced by machines with whole occupations and industries becoming redundant and its giving me a shiver down my spine. This is because he's saying that the world is changing again. We're seeing "workers replace machines".

It's true though. If you look at the economies that have entered world transactional life. You can see that China, India, Poland etc are taking a much bigger part in the world economy in the past decade and the workers that inhabit those worlds are so damn cheap it makes many of our own workers and machines non-cost-effective.

Despite the arguments of a lack of quality service, more and more operations are moving abroad, including telesales, customer support, software development and now construction and engineering.

If you look at this nation now. More and more people have cleaners, nannies, dog-walkers, personal trainers, personal shoppers etc. We're becoming lazy people that need the comfort and the ego-polishing of hiring people to take the "stress" out of our lives. Companies are doing the same. You can hire Eastern-European labour so cheap on the black market that there's no incentive to invest in R&D or training of "indigenous workers".

Those that love gadgets will still buy a Roomba to clean their carpet, but how labour effects our own personal demand for automation is something we'll just have to find out.