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Baobab

(4,667 posts)
Wed Mar 9, 2016, 03:07 PM Mar 2016

The Economic Implications of Global Broadband is Astronomical- lets Discuss telepresence and Jobs

For the sake of this argument, lets pretend AI as its rapidly developing does not exist, nor does services liberalisation.

But - as it is now, network bandwidth, and the costs of basic computer hardware just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.

Cost of fiber or high speed cable Internet approaches almost nothing, approaches zero to hook up anybody on the globe to anywhere else, with lots of bandwidth and low latency.

So then everything that they still can't do with AI becomes possible now with people. People on the other end of a fat pipe can operate any kind of heavy equipment. people can do the finest of fine detailed work. people can do any office job. Entire offices can be located on the other side of the globe, working at night.

Just pay somebody whatever is appropriate where they live, plus a bunch extra if you need them to work at the weird hours., and use their services everywhere, to operate the dumb machines, over the network.

From the interesting to the mundane, driving trucks, tractors, taking orders for hamburgers, filling prescriptions, flying cargo planes, piloting ships, operating on patients.

The only jobs which cannot be done this way are underwater because salt water blocks radio waves.

this is all lumped together under the heading "cross border data flows".

What happens to the people who were doing those jobs before?

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Orrex

(63,083 posts)
3. LOL. Too true, and it's not just Comcast.
Wed Mar 9, 2016, 03:20 PM
Mar 2016

When I first shopped for high-speed internet access in 2007, I asked Verizon about FIOS and was told "It's not available in your area yet, but we expect it to be in they very near future."

When I again shopped for high-speed in 2011, I asked Verizon about FIOS and was told "It's not available in your area yet, but we expect it to be in they very near future."


Ah, progress!

Baobab

(4,667 posts)
8. Not all the technologies I'm describing need a lot of bandwidth at all.
Wed Mar 9, 2016, 04:36 PM
Mar 2016

The thing that is represented as adding value is the ability of people to eliminate the need for having a physical plant, in many cases businesses basically can exist completely in cyberspace, also, for a lot of what I am describing there are very large wage differentials so, a push is underway to mutually recognize credentials and allow cross border data flows and movement of natural persons to provide services.

Orrex

(63,083 posts)
9. I don't mean to disparage your idea at all
Wed Mar 9, 2016, 04:37 PM
Mar 2016

I simply wanted to mock our own fine nation's telecom giants.

bemildred

(90,061 posts)
4. The question is: supposing all that came to pass, is it actually better?
Wed Mar 9, 2016, 03:23 PM
Mar 2016

Co-location can have many benefits too.
Having someone work just for you can have benefits too.
What if you don't want some guy you don't know from Adam meddling in your affairs?
Perhaps you object to the commodification of work?

On the other hand, for people with specialized competencies, it could come in handy.

So it comes down to making sure the tool fits the job, and does not become the job itself.

Baobab

(4,667 posts)
6. Good points!
Wed Mar 9, 2016, 04:18 PM
Mar 2016

>Co-location can have many benefits too.

>Having someone work just for you can have benefits too.

especially when you know one another and want that person's services exclusively because they are very highly skilled. yes.

Consultants typically recommend that companies maintain all of their core competencies in house. Anything you cannot replace SHOULD stay in house. Fully commercial firms that get no government money have the most freedom, but even they may subcontract to save money.
There are some little known reasons why these changes are all occurring - some are new technologies, oters are economic, saving money, in some cases a lot of money, others are politically driven such as trade agreements. Countries can get benefits from liberalising for their companies, like national treatment and most favored nation status (MFN) one needs to know what a service schedule is to see how the trading works- Big areas are being taken out of the governments hands. government has been constrained a great deal now since the mid 90s in terms of what they do, if a competitir exists for that area, they have to switch to using it. Some time ago, changes occurred that put signatory governments in the position where any governmental 'service' that had or has even one private 'competitor' must be liberalised. So that is driving the commodification and forcing governments to privatize and the more developed ones do not get any wiggle room as far as discrimination so they also have to globalize. You can read a great deal about the issues involved there in the Indian press over the last year. (one of the last countries to sign on to this) Of course india sees huge potential gains because India is a major player in call centers and remote data processing as well as consultancies and contracting/staffing.

The simplest kinds of telepresence have been around for over a century in the form of the telephone.. Expansion of CTI technologies like screen pop have made the operation of call centers a big business with warehouses of workers taking orders and doing data entry and various kinds of customer service becoming more and more geographically distributed to "maximize the value in the supply chains".

I think that the big driver of cross border data flows will be commodified services like the ones I mentioned that can be done by other firms in a billable by event manner.

As to whether a given job is transformed by telepresence or commodified in other ways, its clear that wholly commercial businesses will grow and the public sector will shrink a great deal and much of that change will be taken up by a much more globally distributed plethora of services tailored to address those niches in the most cost effective way. Especially in adres where a lot of public money is spent like education and health care.

The source of money will matter a lot - i.e. is it some servce that now is considered government procurement..

(as to whether competitive international bidding is required..)

The corporate world wont be constrained because its not public money.. they can decide to keep jobs in house and many should and will. Especially their core competencies. the things by which their business is defined, which varies from business to business.

>What if you don't want some guy you don't know from Adam meddling in your affairs?

Thats been and continues to be a huge driver of technology adoption.

>Perhaps you object to the commodification of work?

Everybody likely does to some degree, but the pressure is very high to do it because of competitive pressures. especially if you have to win a competitive bin to get a contract and all the bidders will have to figure out the most efficient way to do the job and base their bids on those costs.

>On the other hand, for people with specialized competencies, it could come in handy.

Its virtually impossible to predict who is going to come out ahead except that its unlikely to be the people who currently are seen globally by the people pushing these things as the beneficiaries of protectionism.

>So it comes down to making sure the tool fits the job, and does not become the job itself.

yes, exactly, a tool is only as good as the person using it if we pretend that AI is not part of the picture at all. Once AI comes in, though, its entirely probable that eventually the machine operator can just step away and the machine at that point will know how to do it themselves.

But I think one of the most likely telepresence technologies to be adopted will likely be an application that is already in common use, telepresnce in medicine.

Its possible to use high resolution video and fast networks and use it to deliver dental care to people in remote areas or in underserved low income communities.

One cutting edge US state is getting ready to go into telepresence to solve their dental care crisis.

Thats where the government procurement aspect of it will mean high amounts of savings. To take advantage of that countries with low wages but high skill workers likely will see large net gains, both in terms of telepresence and in whats called mode four, movement of natural persons.

Ford_Prefect

(7,817 posts)
5. Until my neighbor sucks up the bandwidth.
Wed Mar 9, 2016, 03:42 PM
Mar 2016

or the next Hurricane wipes out the switching station down the road, or the power to it. Or people will discover that microwave energy is not always the healthiest thing to fill the air with.

They said this about Satellite and then Cable and now broadband. "They" will find a way to screw it up or parse the service so that only the very wealthy can buy it, as they have done for decades now.

Baobab

(4,667 posts)
7. Broadband internet is now so essential that companies cannot operate without it
Wed Mar 9, 2016, 04:29 PM
Mar 2016

at all.

As shown by how businesses close when the power goes out. Which reminds me we desperately need to create a much more resilient society on a great many levels that can maintain a much more redundant power and telecommunications capacity than we have today.

that also applies to social contract and buy in. We're flirting with disaster if we use technology to betray large numbers of people just because they have nothing in writing, which is definitely happening, one would gather. If the current set of priorities continues, we will have a very un-resilient society, and whatever befalls us when something breaks will have been a totally avoidable disaster.

Greed is penny wise but pound foolish.

Initech

(99,909 posts)
11. It won't be coming to my neighborhood anytime soon.
Wed Mar 9, 2016, 05:20 PM
Mar 2016

Took us 10 years from the introduction of cable internet to finally having it. And we still don't have DSL.

I'm hoping Google Fiber will show up in the next couple of years. If not I'm moving somewhere where it does.

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