Outsourcing Everything

Late last month in Wired, in a column titled “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” Clive Thompson argued that “the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.”

This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

To Thompson, this was something to be concerned about. “Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?” – for example, the way that involves “slowly ingesting and retaining a lifetime’s worth of facts”?

It seemed like a good question, and Thompson’s piece stayed on Wired’s most-e-mailed list a long time – long enough, apparently, for New York Times columnist David Brooks to absorb it and offer his own perspective on mental outsourcing:

Personal information? I’ve externalized it. I’m no longer clear on where I end and my BlackBerry begins….

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic…. Om.

Yeah, interesting. But he might not have left it there, with a clunky joke. And Thompson might have done better than to end with the mild wish that “At the very least, I’d like to be able to remember my own phone number.” Because the more you look at “mental outsourcing,” the more it looks just like its cousin, business-task outsourcing – theoretically a good thing, but in reality riddled with traps and hazards.

The Argument for Outsourcing

Outsourcing is unobjectionable in theory because it is a form of trade, and, in theory, benefits both parties. In the business sphere, a company can outsource functions formerly handled internally to some cheaper external provider, and in so doing can save money and free up management to focus on higher-value tasks – tasks for which the company retains a “comparative advantage.”

In mental outsourcing, the transaction is consumer-to-business (or, in a sense, consumer-to-machine) rather than business-to-business. The “layoffs” and other shifts in labor occur in the consumer’s neocortex, rather than in the company’s workforce.

But otherwise the two phenomena are virtually the same. The consumer pays the provider to handle, externally, via some gadget or online service, some function that had been performed internally – such as the memory of telephone numbers, or directions to Aunt Sally’s house. How does the consumer get a return on his investment? Consider the GPS navigation device David Brooks says he has in his car. In principle it saves time (no more wrong turns) and money (no more maps, no more wasted fuel) and overall psychic health (no more stressing out over wrong directions or lost maps). In principle it also frees up “management” to focus on higher-value tasks by demobilizing the gray matter once dedicated to driving directions.

The logic couldn’t be simpler, could it?

Failure of Consideration

But here’s one problem: You might end up not saving time (or enjoying even a sustainable aesthetic benefit) with some new gadget. It might be one of those “ultrasound toothbrushes” or “voice-activated grocery list” thingamabobs from the Sharper Image catalogue that looks good when you buy it but doesn’t improve your efficiency one iota, and ends up lying around wasting space.

It also might not “free up” any real mental capacity. The brain is not perfectly plastic, and the fact that one neural network, formerly engaged in a task, gradually withers doesn’t necessarily cause the “freeing” of significant resources for other tasks. In fact, the whole process of forgetting one skill and learning a new one (i.e., to manage the newly externalized task) might end up being an insurmountable barrier in terms of time and effort, especially for an older brain.

This barrier-to-change problem can happen to an outsourcing company, too – for example when its offshoring scheme ends up unexpectedly bogged down in the red tape or corruption of some Third World bureaucracy, or becomes unmanageable due to the previously-concealed incompetence of the foreign service provider.

Admittedly this is a relatively mild hazard-category, but it serves as a good introduction to a more serious one.

Outsourcing the Core

Supposedly when you outsource a task you are better able to focus on your remaining higher value functions, and perhaps – for a business – even on a single “core competency.”

But what happens if, flushed with the faith that “all outsourcing is good,” you end up outsourcing your core competency?

Think it doesn’t happen? Exhibit A is the U.S. government, the largest outsourcer anywhere. Among the traditionally in-house functions it has recently outsourced are prisoner-interrogation, field espionage, intelligence analysis, and perhaps most notoriously, personnel security – to companies like CACI and Blackwater who haven’t always performed creditably, to put it mildly. Just what is the government’s core competency, if it can’t handle basic military and intelligence functions but must hire contractors (many of them newly-discharged servicemen) for sums that seem vastly, stupidly more than the services are worth?

Exhibit B is the more subtle core-loss alluded to by Clive Thompson, when he worried that the cognitive potential that comes from “slowly ingesting and retaining a lifetime’s worth of facts” could be eroded by too much outsourcing of memory to gadgets and the Web.

This problem might be even easier to see in terms of an organization, say a business or a branch of government. Such groups have what might be called an “ecology of competence” that arises from the symbiosis – and perhaps just as importantly, the creative serendipity – of different skills and backgrounds. Mary in Manufacturing benefits from bouncing ideas off Eric in Engineering and Martha in Marketing, and so on. Like a coral reef’s ecology, this system may be somewhat fragile. Remove one element and the performance of the whole may begin to decay.

From a management perspective, this problem is really a failure to perceive the ecology of a company’s competence in the first place, and thus to prevent outsourcing from intruding on it and damaging it. And there may be no easy way to perceive this ecology until it has already been harmed – and by then it may be too late.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? But there are far worse hazards to be encountered in the outsourcing game.

The Wall of Obsolescence

Outsourcing, mental or corporate, is a basic mechanism of evolution. Done right, it represents an increment of innovation and successful adaptation for a person or a company. As such we are likely to treat it as a kind of progress and, at the very least, will be disinclined to stand in its way.

But consider the reality of biological evolution on Earth: Almost no species survives in the same form for a significant span of geological time. Almost inevitably, a species runs into a situation where it can’t adapt quickly enough to cope with the changing competition or the environment. It hits a kind of wall – the “wall of obsolescence,” we might call it – and is surpassed by its rivals or overwhelmed by the environment, and becomes extinct.

Something like this is happening now, to millions of businesses in developed countries. They are outsourcing and offshoring function after function, until they are down to their remaining “core competencies.” And then they are finding that these core competencies simply aren’t good enough to make it against, say, Indian IT workers, or Chinese electronics manufacturers, or the high price of oil. And so these companies are going extinct.

One of the most influential academic perspectives on offshoring these days comes from Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton who was formerly on President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. Blinder is a free-trade supporter, but lately he has styled himself as a modern “Paul Revere,” warning Americans (and Westerners generally) of the economic cataclysm that lies before them. As he put it in a paper several months ago, the Internet-enabled offshoring of service jobs from rich places like America to less-rich places like India will force “a nasty transition, lasting for decades, in which not just millions but tens of millions of jobs are lost” and another huge number of workers see their real wages depressed by global competition.

Blinder advocates massive worker-retraining programs to speed Americans into jobs that aren’t easily offshorable, and thus to shorten this painful adjustment process. He looks forward to a “promised land,” a couple of decades from now, in which Americans return to full employment, having regained global competitiveness in a healthy range of skills.

But is such a happily-ever-after believable? Blinder neglects to mention the other, ongoing form of outsourcing which is not to cheaper human labor but to cheaper machine labor – which, unlike Indian IT workers or Chinese factory workers, is always getting cheaper. It is hard to see how there could be any “promised land” for American labor, or any economic role for human labor generally, if this trend runs its course.

Robotics and AI experts have a better handle than ever on the architecture and processing power needed for machines to perform most human tasks. Typically, they put the arrival date of such “smart” machines about two decades from now – in other words, around the time that a child born now would graduate from college into the job market.

But its not as if we have another twenty years to prepare for this socioeconomic tsunami. Robots and computers and other automated systems are already here and evolving their way up the labor value chain as fast as they can. Receptionists and toll booth operators have been losing their jobs to automated systems for years. Checkout clerks are starting to feel the chill now, thanks to the tagging of merchandise with automatically readable RFID-tags. Roboticists have already developed an autonomous vacuum cleaner and pool cleaner, and are scrambling to invent robot housekeepers and waiters that will put many millions of flesh-and-blood ones out of business. By the time they do there might be few human pilots left too, given the increasing sophistication of flight computers. The Pentagon now has so many unmanned and autonomous aircraft on its drawing boards that it’s hard to see how any young person today could seriously look forward to a career in military aviation.

In any case, it is interesting to speculate on how the economy would work in a post-labor world. Will the present trend away from labor, and towards capital (i.e., money and technology) as the driver of GDP continue all the way to its logical conclusion? Will people survive economically, two decades from now, either by managing their assets (such as armies of robot workers and AI systems) or by becoming dependent, in one way or another, upon those who do? How long will it take for supersmart machinery to push even human entrepreneurs out of the market?

All that is hard to know from here in 2007, but one thing should already be clear: Despite our best efforts to enhance our productivity with various hardware and software, those external systems are evolving faster than our brains are. The wall of human obsolescence isn’t far off, and it seems like a bleak prospect.

Here it might be objected that the wall of obsolescence is about natural limitations on evolvability, and as such isn’t caused by outsourcing per se. It is merely an acknowledgement of what every student learns in high school biology – that evolution yields few winners and many losers. But as I’ve argued, cultural evolution is largely driven by outsourcing, mental and corporate. If we were to stop outsourcing – to stop making and using new technology, to stop the global labor arbitrage that sends American jobs to Hyderabad and Guangzhou – we effectively would stop the process that leads to human obsolescence.

Not an attractive choice, is it? By stopping cultural evolution, we would become something like the Amish, frozen in time.

But what is the alternative? To keep running, faster and faster, always adapting until we have evolved into robots ourselves – as some AI enthusiasts have suggested we do? That strikes me as hardly different from human extinction anyway.

Outsourcing Autonomy

I want to give some attention to David Brooks’s point about the loss of autonomy. This is arguably only another way of looking at the “outsourcing the core” problem I mentioned above. But looking at it as an autonomy problem makes it easier to discern all the hazards.

The most obvious aspect of the autonomy-loss problem is dependency. As a society outsources goods and services offshore it becomes increasingly dependent on those foreign suppliers. Beyond a certain point, that dependency may be deemed too hazardous, because the risk and the costs of an extended interruption in supply (or a surge in prices) are too great. Unfortunately, governments, like individual humans, seldom have the foresight to hedge successfully against this problem.

America’s deep reliance on imported oil is a case in point. What happens when the tap is shut off, or when oil becomes too expensive? Similarly, on the scale of a single human, what happens when all those functions conveniently outsourced to technologies such as cellphones and GPS systems suddenly stop working – leaving one, for example, lost and incommunicado in a wilderness?

But the autonomy problem isn’t just about the risk of a sudden cutoff of outsourced functions. In fact, that should be among the least of our worries. The greater and more present danger is that the systems on which we depend become corrupt and malign.

The extreme version of this is something Hollywood imagines from time to time in films like 2001, The Terminator, The Matrix, and I Robot. But a less extreme version happens in real life every day, in the form of identity theft, malware and spyware, tracking cookies, robocalls, billing errors, and so forth. And let us not forget advertising, which infects an increasing number of the systems to which we outsource our daily functions, and coerces us relentlessly – to buy things we don’t need, to want things we can’t have, and generally to be dissatisfied with the way things are.

The Selfish Servant

All the tools and gadgets and systems to which we humans, over the millenia, have been outsourcing our mental functions are collectively known as culture. We tend to think of culture as a kind of high-level servant. But arguably, we are now its servants. Over those millenia (here in the West) we individuals have been shrinking in importance, and our culture has been growing – so that today, a Westerner is almost powerless in the world without access to his culture. (Of a New Guinea tribesman we could not say the same.)

Conceivably this is still a bargain – the theoretical bargain of outsourcing. We empower culture, but culture in turn empowers us: to be wealthier, to live longer, to have more choices in life. Which of us would choose to turn the clock back even twenty years, to the world before the Internet, before the cellphone, before the prospect of indefinite lifespan?

But the question we really should be asking is, How long can this go on? The connections between our lives and the culture, particularly via its high-bandwidth backbone, the electronic media, are ubiquitous and ever-growing. And as our culture has been evolving and wiring itself into us, various bits and pieces of our autonomy, including our traditional social ties, have been withering away – to a degree never seen before outside the worst totalitarian states and totalist cults.

The point is not merely that we are losing control. It is that we are losing control to something which, in a real sense, wants to take control from us, and not necessarily for our benefit. In a Darwinian world of competing cultures, this is a trait we might have expected to arise.

The evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins has repeatedly warned against this situation. In The Selfish Gene and subsequent works, he has famously described culture as a set of ruthlessly co-evolving ideas and behaviors, a.k.a. “memes” – analogous to the genes of a biological genome. Relatively few social scientists these days regard Dawkins’s analogy between biological genes and cultural memes as an exact one. But one of Dawkins’s less central points has gained general acceptance, and that is the simple but alarming notion that memes, and by implication the cultures they make up, thrive only insofar as they benefit themselves – in other words, not necessarily for humane reasons. A culture’s espousal of humane values may only be temporary, and starkly inhumane values may be sustainable indefinitely if the culture can exert sufficient control over how people think and act.

Dawkins has referred to this Darwinian, self-aggrandizing aspect of cultures as a selfish “tyranny,” against which our “capacity of conscious foresight” is our only effective weapon.

But speaking of foresight – when have we in the West ever treated cultural evolution as anything other than a sacred cow, to be allowed to run where it will? When have we ever blocked major technological pathways on long-term humanitarian grounds?

Down the road, should the socioeconomic picture become darker, it is conceivable that more and more people will go for such an option – or anyway will choose a pattern of existence whose logical conclusion isn’t a post-human dystopia. But given the spreading power of our culture, and the means of persuasion at its disposal, one has to wonder how many of us will even retain the capacity for making such a choice.

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