Viewpoint: How AI will transform India’s job scene

Thursday, November 8, 2018

By Francis Kuriakose, Deepa Iyer

We live in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) that has provided us with immense processing power, storage capacity, and access to information. The exponential development of technology gave us the spinning wheel in the first, electricity in the second, and computers in the third industrial revolution. In 2016, the World Economic Forum called AI “the fourth industrial revolution” that has radically transformed the way we live, work, and connect with each other. However, it has also given us regulatory challenges such as data ownership and labour protection.

In particular, automation affects jobs and wage levels. A 2013 study by Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment shows that since 2000, only 0.5 per cent of new jobs have been created that did not exist before. This is against 173 million jobs that would be automated in the next eight years in G7 countries, which are also the seven largest advanced economies in the world.

For the developing world, the World Development Report (2016) by the World Bank anticipates the consequence of automation as labour reallocation from labour surplus Asia to labour deficit countries of Latin America and Africa.

Photo courtesy of Sundaramoorthy Thimmarayan.

Source: The Hindu Business Line (link opens in a new window)

Categories
Technology
Tags
artificial intelligence, employment