The Avatar Economy

Big targets: Low-wage workers may one day operate robots in other countries. Here, an 1,800 mile range of operation is shown for various outsourcing centers. At longer ranges, time delays would make controlling robots more difficult.

High-end users in major U.S. and European cities will reach the 160-megabits-per-second threshold between 2014 and 2015 if current trends hold. Avatar workers are not far behind. Mexico, China, Poland, and Thailand have added 26.4 million high-bandwidth Internet users in the last 12 months. These countries have relatively low labor costs and are close to more developed countries. More than half of U.S. states are within 1,800 miles of the Mexican border; if workers in the Dominican Republic are considered as well, only Alaska and the northern tip of Maine are out of range.

Telepresence means that in theory, ten, a hundred, or a thousand times as many workers could compete (virtually) for the same work. No matter how bad things get in Madrid or Houston, an avatar worker somewhere else could sell his or her labor for less. The same outsourcing logic applies to many high-wage jobs that rely on physical presence and motor skills, including the work done by cardiologists and machinists.

Previous waves of outsourcing should remind us: the legal, political, and social obstacles to an avatar economy may prove greater than the technical ones. How will the meaning of work change when a gardener bot is controlled by a different remote worker every day? Or when one driver supervises 50 mostly autonomous taxis? What—and how much—work will be left in areas with the highest labor and housing costs?

Outsourcing physical work would bring huge economic gains, but it would also cause problems. In contrast to Cameron's movie, Alex Rivera's independent film Sleep Dealers offers a bleak vision of : the Mexican protagonist turns to the black market for risky surgical implantation of virtual-reality "nodes" that allow him to interface with stateside worker bots.

I believe outsourcing of nonroutine labor via robotic telepresence could begin to occur on a mass scale within a decade. Let's take the time to manage thoughtfully while it is still young.

Matt Beane is a doctoral student in information technology at MIT's Sloan School of Management, where he studies the effects of robotic telepresence and artificial intelligence on work.

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