Automation vs. Outsourcing: who wins?

From InformationWeek I know it's another self-justifying consultancy report... but doesn't it have the ring of truth about it?

In the manufacturing sector in the 90s, companies sold $100 billion worth of software and hardware for robotics, said Harvey Cohen, president of Strategy Analytics. While the technology increased productivity and added to companies' bottom lines, it also eliminated 10 million jobs worldwide.

In the new millennium, as the use of intelligent computers increase, jobs will vanish, with several million expected to disappear over the next five to seven years, Cohen said. While less labor to do more work is great for business, there will be an impact on society as people find decent paying jobs harder to find.

Technology "will take the job growth out of the industries that the government has said are good places to develop employment," Cohen said. "So we've raised the question, have they thought this problem through properly?... Looking forward, we don't really see the big threat in the long run being outsourcing to India. We see the real threat from outsourcing to intelligent capital.

Are we ready to live the players' life, in the face of this mental automation? According to PM Blair, the last experiment in those kind of values led to social rack-and-ruin. More on the latter point in later posts.