Quite early in his 2012 book ‘Robots will steal your job, but that’s ok,’ author Federico Pistono presents an idea known to supporters of technology as ‘The Luddite Fallacy.’ A reference to angry English textile workers in the early 19th century who protested against imminent job losses by breaking knitting machines and other labour-saving innovations, the term is used to imply that Luddites (or those who fear technology) have got it all wrong. What it suggests, rather, is that new technology creates more jobs than it destroys. So, don’t fret.
For a long time, including a good part of the era of computers and the Internet, this argument seemed difficult to counter. Not anymore. It may have run its course, as Mr. Pistono acknowledges later in the book. And this could dramatically change the way the world functions.
Here’s some data. Technology research firm Gartner predicts software, robots and smart machines will take over one out of three jobs in another 10 years. Futurist Thomas Frey predicted a few years back that two billion jobs, half the total, will disappear by 2030.
Jobs are vulnerableShocking? A layman could well remember 1997, the year IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov and gave the world a glimpse of what technology is capable of. If a computer was outwitting the best of grandmasters at chess, no activity involving the intellect was going to be beyond it. And sure enough, today, all human jobs seem vulnerable. Four years back, another of IBM’s inventions, Watson, beat two champions of the quiz show ‘Jeopardy,’ which the New York Times reported about with the lines “In the end, the humans on “Jeopardy!” surrendered meekly.” Watson-like bots abound now. For instance, if you are right now reading an Associated Press report on an earnings performance of a U.S. company, there is a good chance that it has been put together not by a journalist in flesh and blood but by a bot. The 169-year-old wire news agency last year tied up with eight-year-old, North Carolina-based Automated Insights, whose patented platform automatically turns financial data into stories. Voila!
By no means is Automated Insights the only journalism-disrupting game around. One of its more famous rivals is Narrative Science, whose co-founder believes it won’t be long before a storytelling computer programme wins a Pulitzer Prize.
Then, there is the ‘robot scientist’ Eve which promises to make drug discovery faster and cheaper. To its credit, Eve has already spotted a compound that can be used to fight malaria.
We aren’t forgetting the so-called creative jobs here. And no, they aren’t immune to the tech onslaught, as a viral video by YouTube channel CGP Grey showed last year. The video, titled ‘Humans Need Not Apply,’ brought forth the man versus machine theme, revealing toward the end that its background score was done by a bot.
If software can do journalism, compose music, discover drugs, win a quiz, drive cars, and do many other things that earlier were impossible without a human, what does it say about the coming job market? Those who believe that’s a worrying question include venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and even an artificial intelligence expert such as Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese Internet giant Baidu.
Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs, along with Boston University’s Seth Benzell, Laurence Kotlikoff and Guillermo LaGarda, have dealt with this issue in their February 2015 study ‘Robots are Us: Some Economics of Human Replacement.’ One of the fallouts of the coming in of smart machines, they note, is “a long-run decline in labour share of income.” And the report sounds a warning, indicating that in the absence of policy that redistributes from winners to losers, “smart machines can mean long-term misery for all.”
Other experts have visualised an emerging world of economic lopsidedness, where technological adoption and use could create a few big winners and many big losers. This is what could happen if someone successfully builds and markets an automated system, which while helping its maker reap handsome profits also puts many, many people out of jobs.
The Indian scenarioAs always, it will be argued that India, not being a developed economy, can breathe easy. Yes, the pace of adoption of technology might be relatively slower here than in advanced economies. And yes, it is difficult to imagine driverless cars buzzing around here anytime soon. But it is important to appreciate how India Inc, the organised job-giver, has already taken well to automation.
Auto companies, for instance, have over the years increasingly used robotics, which they have found to be more cost-efficient and less problematic than labour in the long run. IT companies now are betting on automation to deal with a lot of routine stuff. Machine learning, by which software systems learn to make decisions based on data, will only make this significantly better.
In the coming years, some jobs could disappear faster than others. India, where income inequalities are already large, has to start wondering what to make of the coming technology world. For, the Luddites may be finally right.
sriram.srinivasan@thehindu.co.in
