alt Hacker NewsFrom a recent article in The Economist. It turns out that once again many of the jobs that people predicted would be eliminated by AI have instead received a boost, at least for now. This closely follows another recent report on how Indian BPO firms are surprisingly thriving due to AI.
"Moreover, AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They are picking up work training AI models or supervising AI agents. Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. Mr Gallimore says more “high-value” work, such as accountancy or engineering, is going offshore in part because “AI is a leveller. You can now teach someone complex stuff quickly” and still get it done more cheaply than in America or Europe. Some of this is done at so-called global capability centres, captive back offices that are booming in India and also now growing in the Philippines."
It seems like AI has incidentally commoditized the complement (procedural knowledge), and in turn created greater demand for inputs like human judgement and "empathy".
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I visited India recently and when I saw just how many companies have a GCC there I was mindblown. Lots of cool offices, engineering and technical roles, great work life balance and generally a different vibe. Literally every company that I could recognise had a back office there.
“Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. Mr Gallimore says”
How is this HIPPA compliant? Please tell me there’s an aspect of HIPPA that requires sensitive data to be only accessed and processed by Americans on shore. You’d think the multiples we pay on health care for worse outcomes would at least be supporting our own domestic middle class with this sort of basic back office white collar work
Yeah, paradoxically Indian software outsourcing is growing. I guess the way the companies are thinking about this is we need some sort of human oversight for all the work the LLMs are doing, might as well pay someone the least amount possible to do that.
> Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools
So, insurance claims are handled by people who operate in different legal system and by unaccountable undererministic system. And people are pressured to perform fast.
This is not about "automating complex task". This is about "create accountability sink for fraud we want them to do and create system that will perform said fraud".
Ooph, now the AI will be wrong and the human won't know it. And that's running our... let me see... life saving care. Cool. cool. cool.
> It seems like AI has incidentally commoditized the complement (procedural knowledge), and in turn created greater demand for inputs like human judgement and "empathy".
I think as well there is currently the following: AI still needs an operator, in the same way than a bulldozer needs a bulldozer operator. And like with bulldozer, there are always something that business stakeholder wanna dig, now that digging is faster.