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by DeepSeaTortoise 934 days ago
No,

there was already an "AI-like", but much more superior solution available for decades at this point:

Outsourcing the work to a country with low wages. Even nowadays you can get highly skilled workers for like $50 a month in some African countries.

Pay them $500 a month instead and you've got yourself highly motivated employees, who are extremely eager to learn whatever skills you require.

In the very long run robots and "AI" will of course wipe out 99.9% of the available jobs, but at that point we'll have to think about other solutions on the political level anyways.

It is reasonable to assume any jobs done exclusively in front of computers are very early on the chopping block, but as long as you don't see the business majors or business jurists being sent out the door enmasse, I wouldn't worry too much.

And at that point you'll still have first class logical deduction and math skills and a lot of knowledge about algorithms, which are highly valuable skills in general.

2 comments

> Outsourcing the work to a country with low wages. Even nowadays you can get highly skilled workers for like $50 a month in some African countries.

But this is not the norm. In order for company X to hire people from a different country, it is necessary that:

- company X hires contractors/freelancers. The vast majority of people out there in IT work as employees, not as contractors

- company X needs a branch in that country. This is rare

- company X hires in that country via an intermediary company. Not as rare, but usually it's not worth it

Not even in Europe countries hire people from other countries that easily. It's more common now after covid, yes, but it's definitely not "let's hire from country X developers 50% cheaper!"

>Even nowadays you can get highly skilled workers for like $50 a month in some African countries.

No way. The market is getting normalised and even Indian devs make good salary nowadays. Now there's basically rest of world and US market salaries.

Check out e.g. Madagascar. I admit, the salaries are higher now than I remember (or maybe that's just because salaries in the capital are higher), but they're still low enough that you'd end up on a pillory if people were to look into one's business adventures there.

And Madagascar is far from the worst country to be stuck in, since the gunmen to "worker" ratio is rather low compared to other African countries. $50 in Somalia would probably get you a whole, very motivated team and a lengthy prison sentence.

Even if the software salaries are 250$ per month for devs which is what I read online, I seriously doubt you can find a highly skilled engineer for that price. A highly skilled engineer would only struggle to get the first client on Upwork and earn a lot more or just leave the country.

By highly skilled I mean:

1) Fluent in English

2) Good education - you can't get a great education in isolation it's either from other smart people through online contact or the more likely, face to face(university).

3) Open source projects, ability to pass interview

Even devs would hire a highly skilled dev for 50$.

The whole idea just reeks of americans who haven't left their country.

It turns out that Africa and India are on different continents and do not refer to the same place.
It doesn't matter, you can't get a software engineer for 50$ in Africa.