Companies Could Soon Staff ‘Stubbornly Local’ Jobs With Workers 4,000 Miles Away

Packaging potassium sulfate, a fertilizer vital to the planet’s food supply, is visually striking—not because of what you see, but because you don’t see much at all. In China’s Xinjiang region, home to the world’s largest deposit of the mineral, piling it up in warehouses creates dust clouds so severe that workers are forced to drive heavy machinery by feel.

Some companies are now turning to a technology that not only offers a way to see through the dust but also keeps workers from entering the warehouse at all. The system, developed by BuilderX Robotics, a Chinese tech company, uses cameras that are like night-vision for dusty areas. More significantly, operators drive excavators, loaders, and other machines from a remote office filled with rows of videogame-like stations. All they need is a 5G or satellite connection.

The ability to control physical machines from a distance is called teleoperation, and it could become a significant force of change in the global economy.

In Japan, the shelves of over 300 convenience stores are being restocked by robots monitored and sometimes controlled by workers in the Philippines. Düsseldorf airport was slated to begin testing shuttles driven by remote workers in May. A startup in Atlanta is offering robot security guards operated by remote staff, and last summer, a surgeon in France performed a teleoperated procedure on a patient in India.

While offshoring teleoperated jobs to overseas workers hasn’t yet become routine, Mark Graham, professor of internet geography at the University of Oxford, suggests the technology is worth our attention because it might enable companies to expand on their well-established habit of outsourcing jobs to places where labor is cheaper.

The use of remote labor isn’t new, Graham told SingularityHub. But teleoperation extends the logic of outsourcing to tasks that were previously thought to be “stubbornly local.”

“The novelty is less about the existence of remote labor and more about the kinds of work that can now be pulled into a planetary labor market,” he said. “Once that happens you can expect the usual pressures around labor arbitrage, control, and fragmentation to follow.”

It’s not clear we’re ready for the consequences.

BuilderX Robotics is a global leader in teleoperation for heavy machinery and a good expression of the changes ahead. Shaolong Sui, a graduate of Stanford University with a degree in mechanical engineering, founded the company in 2018 as a response to labor shortages in the construction industry in Asia.

“A shortage of trained operators isn’t a problem only in developed countries,” he told me. “Young people here in China don’t want to do this work. It’s dusty and dangerous.”

Rather than focusing on full robotic autonomy, which many construction companies have pursued over the past decade, Sui identified teleoperation as a more realistic way to move operators from harsh environments to safer conditions. Making use of the proliferation of low-cost sensors and 5G at the time, Sui completed a prototype in 2019. Today, his company offers teleoperation for 14 different industrial machines, including excavators, loaders, and bull dozers.

In our conversation, it was clear he hopes to improve working conditions for manual laborers. I lost track of the number of times he mentioned removing operators from dangerous worksites. “These workers deserve a better life,” he said.

BuilderX’s workstations do seem to have transformed some of the punishing work of an industrial site into a more white-collar experience, complete with tea and coffee break rooms and toilets down the hall. Sui said his solution allows construction firms to hire senior citizens or people with disabilities who, thanks to the videogame-like interface, can now operate heavy machinery. In another video, a Japanese woman who pilots an excavator proudly shows off her complex nail art, something she claims she couldn’t maintain when she worked in the field.

“Not only is this a much safer workplace, but the lifestyle benefits are that you can sit in an air-conditioned space, enjoy your tea, and when you go home, you’re still clean,” Sui said.

There’s no doubt the approach is safer for frontline workers like those in Xinjiang. Evidence suggests that high levels of potassium dust exposure can cause chronic bronchitis. While pulling someone from dangerous work is a good thing and that should be taken seriously, Graham told me, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re free from exploitation.

“A worker can be removed from the physical site and still be subjected to intense surveillance, deskilling, isolation, fragmented contracts, algorithmic management, and downward pressure on wages. In other words, the risk can move rather than disappear,” he said.

Sui and Graham both agree there are plenty of forces that might slow the pace of outsourcing. Currently, none of BuilderX’s customers offshore work to overseas operators. But that doesn’t appear to be a technology constraint, as recently demonstrated by an operator in Poland controlling an excavator over 4,000 miles away in Beijing. On the technical side, latency—the delay between operator and machine—and reliability will shape the rate at which firms can choose to offshore workers. But it’s more likely to be limited by regulatory constraints in the form of licensing, insurance, and safety requirements.

That said, Graham believes the biggest force driving work overseas will be the same one that’s pushed clerical and service work offshore; the relentless pursuit to increase profit and reduce cost.

“If firms can hire people in lower-wage labor markets to operate expensive equipment thousands of miles away, many of them will try,” he said.