[yowlingcat]

It's based on the faulty presumption that labor outsourcing motivations are purely based on cost minimization. Obviously, this falls apart if one considers that outsourcing also occurs for specialized labor that firms prefer not to keep in-house.

A great example of this is legal. If you rewrote the title as "Lawyers are hugely expensive -- why not automate them?" it would sound patently absurd.

[Strangs]

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/technology-is-changing-the-l...

There may be more validity in this whole approach than it would appear at first glance.

[yowlingcat]

I'm not saying that there isn't -- but another common fallacy you'll see is conflation of rote work automation with decision automation. Rote work automation is very doable and quite helpful, but it helps create a force multiplier for the human who is at the end of the day doing the job.

Decision automation is not easy at all -- whether for executives or for legal. There's a lot of root cause analysis, presumption unpacking, and other complex problem definition that's intrinsic to the nature of the role.

But that's a crucial distinction -- if you can't automate the decisioning, you're not necessarily going to make CEOs (or lawyers) less expensive; on the contrary, you may rather just increase the scope of what they're capable of doing (because there were all these other things they would've done had they had the resources and tools to do).

I think of that the same way I think of the "Software engineers are expensive -- why not automate them?" question. Maybe some of it can be automated, but some of it is just plain human problem solving. Not all human problems can be solved with automation. Especially if/when faulty automation is what created those problems in the first place!