>Teleoperation makes this even stranger. A surprising amount of so called automation today is really labour that has been routed through a screen. There are Filipino workers sitting in offices in Manila wearing VR headsets, remotely steering shelf stocking robots through Japanese convenience stores. There are people in one country sitting at desks, driving forklifts in another country using multi screen setups and a steering wheel, stepping in only when the semi autonomous software gets confused. Security robots patrol office corridors with a remote human ready to take over through a tablet whenever anything looks off.
> It feels like immigration without immigrants. The rich country gets the labour it wants at a wage that looks more like Manila than Tokyo, but nobody has to build new housing, merge school systems, negotiate over culture or passports. On the rich side, it can be sold as productivity, which plays well politically. On the worker side, it is another rung in the long ladder that runs from call centres to business process outsourcing to micro task platforms. The worker is still human, still fallible, still earning just enough to keep going, but geographically they are treated more like part of the network than part of the town.