Economics of Smart Speakers and the Third World

Smart speakers; transmitter receivers imbued with artificial intelligence, are a new revolutionary wave to replace human workers at a number of semi-professional and clerical jobs. Bank tellers could be replaced with smart speakers that provide accurate full service, customer identification confirmation and financial transactions in-errantly. Smart speakers will know everything possible about insurance needs and customer desires and provide the most direct responses algorithmically possible. The entire financial service sector will experience and increase in workforce efficiency and reduction of personnel simultaneously equivalent to that experienced in secretarial pools with advent of personal computers for business.

Since most electronics manufactures have been relocated from the United States to China and elsewhere the nation has increasingly relied upon the financial sector for job growth. That trend will reverse and a variety of other professional and semi-professional jobs will be relocated to offshore, cheap-labor Internet facilities to service the American luxury personal service consumer and business market.

A bright spot could exist amidst the smart speaker revolutionary reduction in quality jobs; increasing numbers of Americans can be trained to be order fillers for Amazon and Ali Baba. Yet while Americans enjoy the new opportunities in order fulfillment service work, others will remain to work machines in natural resource extraction and process sales to new consumers abroad generating profits for the 1%  to reinforce prosperity for global plutonomy.

Though state across the nation can experience increasing ecospheric degradation through dirty resource extraction productivity, there is a concern that the failure of the United States to lead in development and production of low cost consumer and solar energy capture technology will allow Chinese producers to dominate the new consumerism and alternative energy development business throughout the second and third world from Africa to Latin America. Because China presently produces the majority of the world’s cheap consumer electronics and solar capture for energy technology they will have a substantial advantage in building sales and distribution facilities in Mexico, and Brazil to supply alternative and home energy production requirements. The United States will have it luxury market $1000 made-in-China Apple telephones of course, yet those are of little interest in the third world mass consumer market except to thieves.

While the United States is reinforcing dirty, global warming fuels that support a particular kind of U.S. political economy and degrading every fishing habitat it possibly can, China will be leading sales of clean energy, non-rent paying solar power utilities sales and installation and quite likely ramping up production facilities in Africa and Latin America while Americans are watching the price of West Texas Intermediate crude and deeply polluting ground water with deep underground fracking.