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Comment by drumhead | Hacker News Reader

It's the logical endgame for outsourcing. Find the cheapest possible supplier that can do an adequate job. It sounds potentially disastrous for the outsourcing industry globally, but it will release workers to go into other sectors especially in countries with a demographic timebomb issue.

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And a bit more than that. The quality of outsourced customer support is so poor that AI might even do a better job for the 90% scenario. I wouldn't be surprised with increased customer satisfaction and lower costs if they handle most cases with AI and leave to slightly higher paid humans to handle the exceptions.

The rise of AI is especially problematic for India where business process outsourcing makes up a significant fraction of the GDP and most of the GDP growth. Unless Indian export-oriented manufacturing really takes off there is absolutely no hope for the Indian economy.

They do have great people in software development, but not in the numbers needed to maintain their GDP, as they have done with cheap outsourcing contracts.

But their problem is our problem everywhere. It might just going to be exaggerated in India.

Strange, I am reading everywhere that India is developing rapidly and will become soon a major economy

Get back to me when Americans start making robo calls to scam Indians.

That's why you have this boom of AI startups right now in India. (basically they're all wrappers around ChatGPT)

I'd want to see more information around that. India is BIG. They're hardly dependent on selling phone-answering jobs to the US. I'm not sure what all their economy is based on, but just their internal economy is absolutely huge.

India's population is like four times that of the US. You will never convince me that outsourcing to the relatively tiny USA is that big a fraction of their GDP, however lucrative it might be.

Apparently it was 8% of GDP in 2017/18:

https://idapgroup.com/blog/it-outsourcing-to-india/#:~:text=....

It’s about 10-15% of gdp of india. But, be careful you could say the same thing about humanity in general. The mayhem of the early 20th century will seem like a walk in the park compared to the terminators / matrix wars.

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