Comment by conductr
4 days ago
How is it any more dystopian than any other offshoring that exist primarily as labor arbitrage?
My in-laws have a full time live in housekeeper that costs $500 per month. And where she’s from, this is a huge opportunity that she went to “maid school” for and many consider excellent compensation. She’s able to send this money home and provides for many family members and has amassed a bit of a real estate empire back home. But, she is absentee. She lives away and rarely gets to visit only about 2-3 weeks a year. So I feel that’s quite sad. They obviously don’t live in the US, because this employment would cost many times more here and probably impossible to even get the proper visas.
Now if this maid was able to live in her village, with her family, and make the same income but perform her tasks through a robot then I think she’d see immediate value in that. So would consumers in America who would love to have housekeepers but can’t afford the local labor rates. Even if you can afford some here, you could get much more for the same budget. A lot of Americans pay this rate for 1-2 cleanings per month, that’s dumb money if you could spend it on something that would sweep up every crumb the day it hit the ground.
> make the same income…
Yeah, that's not the goal of these things.
I'm not sure I'm understanding your opaque comment correctly. But I'm assuming you saying the goal is to crush the already lowest levels of labor wages around the world? Because nobody's building this with the express intention of putting pressure on already low wages. They're building it because if they can make that labor productive and in demand, put it to work, they can monetize it. Labor rates may actually increase. Operating these things may be a specialty of its own with levels of skill. Then it's an economy of it's own and some of the demand may move to where the now-lower labor is in the future.
Good points. It can match willing buyers and sellers of basic household labor that couldn't have happened previously due to economic frictions resulting from distance. This can increase the size of the pie for everyone.