A clever new service called Copytalk may provide a hint. Intended for road-warrior types often away from their keyboards, Copytalk lets you dictate e-mail over your cell phone; then, in a matter of hours your words are transcribed into text and delivered to whomever you specify. Or you can dictate a series of appointments-names, addresses, times, whatever you want-and the next time you synchronize your Palm handheld with your desktop computer, all the notes will appear in your PDA’s calendar. What’s smart about Copytalk is that it uses the most dependable form of voice recognition available-real human beings. But what’s amazing is that through technical wizardry involving audio compression and the Internet, all of the listening, transcribing and e-mailing is done by workers in the city of Chennai, in southeastern India.
In short: you’re standing on a sidewalk in, say, Oklahoma City with your cell phone, verbally composing a message to your friend-and someone in India is taking your dictation and sending the e-mail. If that doesn’t amaze you, then your sense of wonder has been permanently damaged by science fiction. And-judging from the reviews praising Copytalk’s accuracy and spelling-it sounds like the Indians are doing a better job of taking dictation than you’re likely to get from the average American.
Copytalk is an unusually direct example of an accelerating trend. The Internet is making it possible for all kinds of “back office” and technical jobs to move to places like Ireland, the Caribbean, India, China, Russia, and Pakistan. And it’s hard to see why this flow of work won’t continue and even accelerate as long as the Internet improves and the overseas workforce grows more educated.
And they will grow more educated. A few years ago I helped with a book project called “24 Hours in Cyberspace” that provided a snapshot of how, over the course of a single day, the Internet was changing people’s lives around the world. What struck me then was that while the Unites States and Western Europe had plenty of weird anecdotes-cab drivers on Webcams and so forth-the truly life-transforming stories came from the developing world. I remember a hairdresser in Peru who became a major stylist in her city by using the Internet to download and print fashion show photos from couture industry sites in France. She then duplicated the hairstyles for her clientele the next day, months before the glossy fashion magazines arrived in South America.
Unless you’re a hair stylist, that may sound trivial, but it’s indicative of a larger trend: the democratization of information. In the ’80s, for example, the computer language C++ was the hot language you needed to land a job in Silicon Valley. When C++ primers were published, programmers here would buy ten copies to airfreight to their friends in Europe-because the books weren’t available there for another few months. And as far as finding copies in southeast Asia or northern India-you could forget it. Today, by contrast, Java is the new must-have programming language-and you can access the same Java tutorials on the Internet anywhere from Milwaukee to Malaysia.
The Internet is emerging as the great equalizer in the world information economy, making all sorts of opportunities available to hundreds of millions of bright minds who were previously shut out. We’ve seen it in our own office. A few years ago the NEWSWEEK team was developing a Web application for which we needed a particularly tricky little piece of software written. Our lead programmer wasn’t sure he could do it and hired a freelancer. Two weeks later, the code came in; it was clever, compact and worked perfectly. But when I asked if I could meet this talented fellow, my employee looked a little uncomfortable. “I don’t think so,” he said. “He, uh, kind of lives in Moscow.” The young programmer had done what seemed natural to him-went out on the Web, shopped around and picked the best contractor at the lowest price.
Of course, the day may come when it’s not just a matter of lower cost, but that the United States no longer has the technical talent within its own borders to supply its needs. John Paulos, a Temple University mathematician, has warned in books like “Innumeracy” that the United States puts itself in dire economic peril by ignoring mathematics education. The U.S. system too often lets kids stop learning math at an early age if they don’t like it-and thus many students end up inadvertently cutting off the option of technical careers. As a society, America ends up with lots of business people but relatively few engineers who can actually build advanced products or write sophisticated software.
So here’s one Internet impact that we might be underestimating: if the United States doesn’t fix its math-challenged educational system, then the Internet will solve the problem, by providing access to millions of technically-adept workers in other countries. In the end it might turn out that the information highway America invented funnels many of the nation’s best jobs and associated dollars overseas. And then someday, could it be that workers in Oklahoma City will be taking dictation for Chennai?
