Will the
horse and the buggy ever return to our roads? Riding on a tanga was a great fun
in childhood, but they all faded away with our childhood. The manual rickshaw
is getting replaced by the E-rickshaw and the three wheelers. Now if the tanga-walas
and the rickshaw-walas complain that automation is killing us and starving our
children to death, is it a fair criticism? When the world was changing, those
who were intelligent enough saw it as an opportunity to progress in life and
took to the change as fish takes to water, but those who chose to stay as
complaining bystanders then are marginalized and poor today! Who is at fault
for their plight? Surely not development! And those obsolete jobs are never
going to come back. People have to modify their skills to learn to do new
things that are in demand in the job market or they have to learn a whole new set
of skills.
So when
the Left and Left of Centre Thinkdom (LLCT) laments that the government of the
day is not creating new jobs and across seven seas Donald Trump and Bernie
Sanders sing the same tune and shout from every available rooftop that they
will bring back the jobs to America, they are missing the big picture. Those
jobs are never going to come back………..simply because they are of no use.
In
economics, productivity—the amount of economic value created for a given unit
of input, such as an hour of labor—is a crucial indicator of growth and wealth
creation. When productivity and employment are plotted on a graph the two lines
historically closely tracked each other, with increases in jobs corresponding
to increases in productivity. The pattern was clear: as businesses generated
more value from their workers, the country as a whole became richer, which
fueled more economic activity and created even more jobs. Then, beginning in
2000, the lines diverged; productivity continued to rise robustly, but
employment suddenly wilted. By 2011, a significant gap appears between the two
lines, showing economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation.
Brynjolfsson and McAfee of the U.S. call it the “great decoupling.” And
Brynjolfsson says he is confident that technology is behind both the healthy
growth in productivity and the weak growth in jobs.
So has
rapid technological change been destroying jobs faster than it is creating
them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of
inequality in the world today? If the answer to this is yes then what do we do? Do we stop technological
advances for the sake of retaining jobs? Surely not. We need to learn newer
skills, which will be in demand in the new world.
People are
falling behind because technology is advancing so fast that our skills and our
organizations aren’t keeping up. While in India we do not find robots replacing
factory workers regularly, but changes are happening all around us. A less
dramatic change, but one with a potentially far larger impact on employment, is
taking place in clerical work and professional services. Technologies like the
Web, artificial intelligence, big data, and improved analytics—all made
possible by the ever increasing availability of cheap computing power and
storage capacity—are automating many routine tasks. Countless traditional
white-collar jobs, such as many in the post office and in customer service,
have disappeared.
Globalization
– the process by which ideas, people, money, goods and services cross borders
at unprecedented speed, has fired the second salvo. It has allowed industries
in the developed world to shift their manufacturing units to the developing
countries where labour is comparatively cheaper. This has resulted in drying
out of the blue collared factory jobs of the ‘drone class’ in the
industrialized west and given a shot in the arm of developing economies whose
workers today enjoy a better standard of living. But what is palpably missing
is any attempt by the so called developed world to re-train their now idle work
force to learn newer and useful skills. Environment is the biggest challenge to
the very existence of our being today, and the industrialized nations have the
largest carbon footprints. When automobile, textile and pharmaceautical
factories were shutting down and the economy was staring down the crater of yet
another depression then instead of exploiting this environmental challenge and
becoming world leaders in Sun and Wind and Water energy by high quality
research, Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Sander’s predecessors chose to sell bogus home
loans to the those who would never be able to repay and allow fat bonuses for
the corrupt bank honchos. What did the U.P.A do in India? They sold national
assets – coal, land, spectrum etc for peanuts and pocketed huge kickbacks!
The fact
is that unimaginative governments are hollowing out the middle class. Computers
have increasingly taken over such tasks as bookkeeping, clerical work, and
repetitive production jobs in manufacturing—all of which typically provided
middle-class pay. At the same time, higher-paying jobs requiring creativity and
problem-solving skills, often aided by computers, have proliferated. So have
low-skill jobs: demand has increased for restaurant workers, janitors, home
health aides, and others doing service work that is nearly impossible to
automate. Even if today’s digital technologies are holding down job creation,
history suggests that it is most likely a temporary, albeit painful, shock; as
workers adjust their skills. Good and responsive governments are expected to
aid, assist and nurture this process and also help entrepreneurs create
opportunities based on the new technologies. Only then will the number of jobs rebound.
The silver lining is that higher productivity will
eventually deliver cheaper goods and higher disposable incomes, as it did
during the Industrial Revolution. Automation will allow for new technologies to
develop and allow workers to utilise their inborn human skills, their computing
skills and their newly acquired job skills to advantages in ways that are
currently unimaginable. Just as we could not imagine what jobs would emerge
when the cars replaced the horses, or when computers replaced office workers,
so too are we blind to the jobs that will come into existence thanks to 3D
printing or artificial intelligence. The global warming will have to be met
with a host of all new skills and all these are jobs in the making.
If we remove our bias-tinted glasses and try to see
the facts technology has actually been a great job creating machine. Your lone neighbourhood
barber shop employing two has been replaced by a hair styling salon, with
perhaps a spa and a sauna employing eight people in two shifts! Hard, dangerous and dull jobs are on decline like
in agriculture but and
manufacturing but they are being more than offset by rapid growth in the
caring, creative, technology and business services sectors. But then again…..these
skills have to be learnt. Weavers,
knitters, typists, secretaries have fewer options today but teachers, domestic
helpers, welfare, housing, youth and community workers – electricians,
plumbers, furnishers are all in high demand!
Our educational
system is not adequately preparing us for work of the future, and our political
and economic institutions were, till recently, poorly equipped to handle these
hard choices. This needs urgent attention. Driven by revolutions in education
and in technology, the very nature of work will have changed radically—but only
in economies that have chosen to invest in education, technology, and related
infrastructure. Hence the success of ‘Skill India’ is non negotiable.
