Wired:For the past few days - and just writing these words has me wincing with liberal guilt - I've been outsourcing the boring parts of my life to a set of clerks slaving in the developing world, writes Danny O'Brien.
I paid $30 (€20.65) to a website called Ask Sunday - www.asksunday.com - and for that monthly fee, I can e-mail or phone their call centre in India, and ask for any task to be done that could be managed over the phone or internet. Book restaurants, de-spam e-mail inboxes, arrange birthday presents, find a cheap cab service. If it's doable remotely, it's doable from Delhi.
Ask Sunday and its many online competitors (including Brickworks and Your Man in India) represent a fascinating moment in technology and globalisation. The growth of internet telephony, the rise of outsourcing in general, the stark differential in wages between East and West, the spread of tasks that can be completed over the phone or the net, and the rapid decline in free time in the West, all lead to a service that costs pennies yet seems worthwhile for its individual users.
Online services that previously were available only for large corporations often scale down to bespoke, one-off services. In this case, it's "person to person outsourcing", hiring tiny slices of the developing world's service workforce to do tiny slices of our everyday lives.
And I have to say, I love it. For a dollar, I'm happy to have Ask Sunday sit on phone hold for me with a service centre, waiting to cancel a credit card, and then conference call me in when they finally get through to the company. This pile of conference dates I'm planning on laboriously entering into my calendar - I don't see any problem with just e-mailing them to the call centre, and having them type them into my online calendaring program.
But I admit, I do also find it somewhat embarrassing. Mix up the developing world with the sense that I really should be doing my own menial tasks makes this a guilty pleasure - even though, hidden under several layers of corporate indirection, this is exactly how the entire developed post-industrial world works.
Ethical objections apart, though, is this a viable online business? Well, what's odd for anyone with a technological frame of mind who uses Ask Sunday is the constant background thought that these jobs might be more efficiently done by a computer. The space that Ask Sunday occupies is the shrinking area of tasks that require one to use a phone or a computer, but are not automatable.
To see how thin that line is, check out one of Ask Sunday's more exotic competitors - IWantSandy.com.
Like Ask Sunday, IWantSandy has a bland, polite e-mail front-end for a series of common secretarial tasks. The difference is that IWantSandy's fake cheery personality (Sandy is supposed to be your ever-present personal assistant) hides not crowds of outsourced staff, but a smart program that can interpret e-mails and extract tasks, calendar appointments and reminders from your standard flurries of CCs and text messages.
It won't be able to cancel my credit cards over the phone or order me takeout, but Sandy does have the benefit of being free to use. And as those credit card services and restaurants start exposing their own increasingly computerised internal systems to other computers in the wider world, robots like Sandy will become more and more powerful.
The conjunction of cheap labour and something for us to do with it may be a very temporary matter, and Ask Sunday's time in the sun may be limited by the very technological revolutions its founders are exploiting.
Or perhaps there will always be a thin and necessarily human line between what we want computers to understand, and what needs to be explained to them. We don't have help lines run by robotic artificial intelligence programs, because only other humans can understand and react to a help line caller's wide range of potential queries. And we can't send computers to interact with corporate help lines, because computers can't understand what call centre staff are saying to them.
Maybe that means that they'll always need Ask Sunday to intervene, even though that leads to the fantastic irony of me hiring one outsourced person to call another outsourced call centre person (possibly even working in the same building in Delhi) to ask them to type a set of commands into their customer management system to update an address - an act that I could probably have done myself in 30 seconds, had I had direct access to that company's profile of my account.
Or perhaps those functionaries in India and elsewhere will grow bored of doing my drudgery, and build and exploit those systems for themselves. In that case, it's not entirely clear to me whether they'll be coding themselves out of a job - or me out of my comfortable western economic superiority. And I suspect it'll cost a bit more than $30 to find the answer to that question.
