The adaptability of entities already in Kerala’s IT ecosystem will be severely tested, Kerala Electronics and IT Secretary M. Sivasankar has said.
He was speaking at a panel discussion on ‘Staying Relevant at the Age of Disruption’ as part of ‘Disrupting Kerala 2017,’ a summit to examine emerging trends and challenges in the IT landscape. The conference, held at the Technopark on Wednesday, was organised by the Kerala Startup Mission in association with NASSCOM and ICFOSS.
“The companies here will need to prepare substantively for rapid changes to stay relevant since emerging players and students will already have the skills to succeed in the new landscape. Much like how the Industrial Revolution created a new set of jobs, so too will this change offer great opportunities for those prepared for them. We should ride the tide. Kerala is adaptive. We should be able to champion, pioneer, and internalise the change in a manner that benefits the entire society,” Mr. Sivasankar said.
The discussion also featured Bitcoin Canada founder Michael Gord and Embrace Innovations co-founder Rahul Alex Panicker, CARMa Venture Services CMD Nandini Vaidyanathan and Associate Professor at IIITM-K Asharaf S.
Automation
“Any means of livelihood that does not require creativity and empathy, as we understand them, will soon be automated. The better machines get at interpreting human intent, the sooner jobs — whether in construction, clerical work or clinical medicine — will be made redundant. Even of software engineers,” Mr. Panicker said.
According to Mr. Gord, non-creative and non-empathetic jobs will be replaced sooner, those professions will eventually be automated as well with the increasing transparency and reliability of machine to machine communication.
Mr. Gord, who earlier in the day delivered a keynote address titled ‘Tech Disruption – Opportunities & Threats’, predicted that livelihoods in general will be made obsolete. “A guaranteed universal basic income will be the norm in the future,” he said.
