Plus Ca Change, Penang Style

The Far East is the most populous part of the world by a distance. Something like 60% of the global population are near by, well relatively nearby so one of the things that happens is that the cost of labour is cheap. Being someone that does economics for a living, I remember reading that globally there are only 2 billion jobs. Given the population size this means that nearly 50% of all working age people are either unemployed or under-employed so little pressure on businesses to pay up for staff.

That is noticeable here in Penang. The island has 750,000 people and is of relatively small size so is very busy and crowded but also that means lots and lots of low paying jobs away from the factory complexes which are very high tech indeed (Pharma, Tech, Chips, etc) so require highly trained white collar skills as well as the command of English. Away from this salaries drop precipitously and you can see that with jobs that simply wouldn't exist in the west, here there are always people and in many cases multiple levels of back up for that job.

I am completely OK with this as I follow the trend of robotisisation (if that's not a word, it soon will be) and the use of Artificial Intelligence to enhance tech solutions even though I don't necessarily agree with it all as people do need to work for a living. What would they do if there no jobs? Nothing good I suspect.

I met a guy here recently who manages his California IT business from just down the road. OK that's nothing special I know as many people do that these days but its what he does that blew me away.

If you remember the last two Jason Bourne movies, you may remember that on at least two occasions the CIA trackers were trying to find him by hooking into local CCTV networks remotely from wherever it was that they were located and by communication links directing their trackers to find Jason. That was managed by people so even though it took seconds in the movie, that was pretty darned inefficient according to this guy.

Imagine now that you want to do that and you harness the power of AI into the loop. Ditch the people watchers and replace them with a computer image that you have of the person you want to track. And then do it globally. Apparently once you do all of this correctly it now takes less than a nanosecond to find whomever it is that you want to find. Anywhere in the world.

Unsurprisingly law enforcement agencies from all over the world are buying this technology and adopting it. So this computer nerd from the 1970's is now an AI superstar with killer technology that everyone wants. Forget about the intrusion into your personal life. See what this wonder technology can do! I told him that this was 1984's worst nightmare come to life. He laughed. Thanks!

However that world has not made it here yet. Well not entirely anyway. There's a wonderful taxi service here called Grab, a Singapore start up and a competitor to Uber which is also here. As the local taxis are dreadful, both these guys have killed the licensed taxi industry. The service is very fast, very cheap and the people that drive the cars are happy to use this for a second job. We have used both frequently and both are fantastic. We have also met some great local people, all friendly, all inquisitive on their side too.

One young man we met in this way said that his lifetime career ambition was to own his own hawker stand selling the best chicken rice. We asked him his recipe and he said he would be learning from a chicken rice sifu and go from there. Talk about life aspirations but typical of here and I imagine typical of this highly populous region. AI won't have much luck competing with this young man I hope.

The original purpose of this post was something different but clearly I had that other stuff on my mind too! We are just settling in here and have moved into an apartment where we wanted some work done. Nothing major, just putting in a sink and cabinet. Sounds simple but just as anywhere else as soon as you start off with a contractor, he says well if you want that, you'll have to do that and that will be more expensive. Sound familiar? Anyway we agreed on a price way more than we expected and the works to do and the cabinet installers have just been in and I have to acknowledge they did what looks like a great job. The cabinet has a lovely new cabinet smell too.

The various stages of work

So I went in the room where they were working and found a crew there. Maybe 6 or 7 guys. Two were on their phones looking at videos and giggling, one guy the boss had his back turned and was tapping away vigorously on his phone, another two were generally milling around and the one sole guy was doing all the work.

Some things really do not change!