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The death of the reign of the knowledge worker

Outsourcing is over-hyped in the short term, but it’s under-hyped in the long term… If standardized, routine, L-directed (left brained) work such as financial analysis, radiology, and computer programming can be done for a lot less overseas and can be delivered to clients instantly over fiber optic links, that’s where the work will go… Many of today’s knowledge workers will have to command a new set of aptitudes. They’ll need to do what workers abroad can not do equally well for much less money: Using R-directed (right brain) abilities such as forging relationships rather than executing transactions, tackling novel challenges instead of solving routine problems, and synthesizing a big picture rather than analyzing a single component.

(Daniel Pink - A Whole New Mind)

In a nutshell this is why I have not even entertained radiology. Services like Nighthawk are already out sourcing the reading of films. Radiologist are primed for large pay cuts. Likewise, other image based specialties like pathology will be next as slides become increasingly digitized.

 Today, for a fee, a woman in another country can serve as a “gestational surrogate,” carrying a fertilized egg to term and then delivering the baby straight to your door, halfway around the world. We’re not used to talking about that kind of labor as an outsourced job. But farmed-out childbirth has become a full-fledged industry in India, turning the rural poor into wombs for hire.

The practice has become increasingly common with new advancements in in-vitro fertilization. The efficiency of the technology raises ethical, legal and cultural questions about the meaning of parentage.

Like Autotune and drone warfare, the transaction might feel disturbingly mechanized: someone, an infertile couple, for example, creates an embryo in a lab, ships it abroad for gestation in a stranger’s body, then takes possession again after birth. But in a consensual financial arrangement, what’s the big deal, really? There’s less (but still some) stigma surrounding child care services, though that also involves contracting out the duties of motherhood.

But maybe what makes the global surrogacy market so different is that the service providers are women in poor countries who feel compelled to lease their bodies to care for their own families.