Crutcher's post about unsourcing reminded me of some conversations I once had. So, let's continue in this vein for a bit.

First, let's think of an actual example of where unsourcing could affect a fairly large number of people: fast food. Like the auto-industry of the past, fast food workers could be replaced en masse by mechanical counterparts. But, before we even worry about this, is it even feasible to replace cheap labor with a machine?

Let's take some hypothetical burger joint. This one is particularly efficient and needs only 5 workers present at any given time. Also, this franchise pays its workers extremely well (compared to the minimum wage of many) at $10/hour. So, how much is this store's payroll each year?

5 * $10/hour * 24 hours/ day * 365 days/ year = $438000 per year.

So, this hypothetical store pays out almost half a million a year not including other costs such as training, managers, shrinkage, safety equipment, et cetera.

So, if a burger making machine is $2 million, it would only take 4 years for any given franchise to pay it off. After that, the store is 'saving' $438,000/year.

So, this raises some very interesting questions:

• Why isn't McDonald's hiring MIT-trained roboticists


• What would this do to the market/ how would it affect competition amongst fast food companies?


• What do we do with this large number of displaced workers (2 million according to Wikipedia)?

Per #1, they might be, I just don't know. #2, we can only hope that it leads to a price war which heralds back the days of the $0.10 burger. Let's also hope that this is accompanied by some major medical advances to deal with all the new cases of diabetes and coronary illness.

It's the last question that I'm really interested in. Crutcher states that his job is to kill your job. Somehow this seems almost ok when we're talking about software companies, because it means that there's a better product being produced and also that you can just go to a new software job. But what happens when the jobs of unskilled labor become unsourced? This has happened many times before, with mechanized farming and the like, but what do we do when almost all unskilled labor can be mechanized away? There are several possibilities. One of the easiest would be to just give them a government stipend every month to let them buy things like the (now) cheap hamburgers. However, our good-ole-American hard-working attitude certainly feels cheated by people getting things for free. We could work on training them to become skilled in some task. But what skills will be unsourced next? Another possibility is that we just put our fingers in our ears and pretend that this kind of technology does not, and will not, exist and continue to pay the pittance to the unskilled labor we have.

I'm not sure how this will be resolved, but I certainly think it's a very interesting point of discussion. We should probably talk about it now before the Burger-o-matic 1.0 is released.

Labels: unsourcing