Robotic Nation Evidence

The sci-fi book Manna describes a future where computers take over more and more of the tasks in restaurants and retail stores -- places which employ approximately 20 million Americans today. This article takes a page right out of the book:

The New York Times >A Drive-Through Lane to the Next Time Zone

From the article:

off Interstate 55 near Cape Girardeau, Mo., and into the drive-through lane of a McDonald's next to the highway and you'll get fast, friendly service, even though the person taking your order is not in the restaurant - or even in Missouri.

The order taker is in a call center in Colorado Springs, more than 900 miles away, connected to the customer and to the workers preparing the food by high-speed data lines. Even some restaurant jobs, it seems, are not immune to outsourcing.

The man who owns the Cape Girardeau restaurant, Shannon Y. Davis, has linked it and 3 other of his 12 McDonald's franchises to the Colorado call center, which is run by another McDonald's franchisee, Steven T. Bigari. And he did it for the same reasons that other business owners have embraced call centers: lower costs, greater speed and fewer mistakes.

He also knows that this call center can move to India, where the costs will be 10x lower. Within 15 years, robotic voice recognition systems will allow these kinds of tasks to be handled completely by robots and kiosks.

Think about how many jobs can already be outsourced to India using this kind of technology (either voice-only or video-phone): bank tellers, job interviewing, directory assistance, tax preparation, security, medicine... The number of jobs we are talking about is immense. See Robotic Nation and these posts for details:

• The automated intensive care unit
  
• Outsourcing
  
• Robotic speech processing