This post is not about
- The predicted doom because of Artificial Intelligence (AI) vying for world domination.
- A war with the Decepticons on one side and Earthlings and Autobots on the other.
- The havoc to be unleashed by the 'Jarvis' that Mark Zuckerberg is going to build which may take control of FaceBook and dictate 'free basics' terms to the poor.
This post is about (well sort of) the emergence of Automation, AI, Advanced robots and 3D printing and what it means to the world and its workforce which has an effect on the social, political and economical landscape of the countries, especially India.
This, I believe, would be the biggest 'Disruptor' (if I may borrow the jargon that most of the business world is looking up to these days!) of the century if not the decade. It has implications to disrupt both manufacturing and services and lives up to the name by creating and unlocking huge value. However, we have one huge problem. They don't disrupt other not-so-efficient, middlemen-infested, traditional, change-averse, brick-and-mortar-based and not-agile businesses. But rather disrupt and replace humans from their jobs and in turn their lives, social structure and the world as we know it. After all, humans are, err, just humans!
Companies today evidently are moving away from human resources to robotic, machine-based resources. This was necessitated by many factors including quality, quantity, stagnation of technical innovation, financial innovation and rising costs and even demography. Robots were able to deliver the best quality consistently unlike humans, the machines could run 24x7 to meet sudden surge in demand and except for regular maintenance, overhaul and the other overheads associated with the robots there was no significant costs unlike humans where labor costs go up as the standard of living improves. And when demand falls they can be just switched off unlike humans who can't be fired and had to be paid.
This is not a fad associated with manufacturing alone. When someone says services industry in India what immediately comes to mind is the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) centres using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to attend to customer calls from across the world. However, Artificial Intelligence is making huge strides that this industry could be completely taken over by them. One need not look far to be convinced for this. Our AI assistants in today's smartphones - Google Now in Android, Siri in iOS and Cortana in Microsoft could do many things with just voice commands. Going forward programs like Eugene Goostman would better their Turing test scores and start vying for the BPO jobs that helped bring many out of poverty in Asia.
Neither manufacturing nor service industry is immune to this phenomena. However, this won't happen overnight and that is the consoling part - that humans would evolve to face it. But will it be slow enough for countries with huge population like China and India is the hard question. In India alone it is said that there are millions of new graduates graduating every year and government promote policies - #MakeInIndia, #SkillIndia, #StartUpIndia, #StandUpIndia, labor policy overhauls, et cetera - to absorb them into the workforce. However, this may be too late, too little.
Today India and the rest of the world is not able to compete with China on price. This is because they are able to keep their currency low and pay their workers even lower in sweat shops where they toil like animals. Tomorrow if they replace their workers with machines, their costs would go down further and we wouldn't be able to compete with the best and cheapest workforce. What we need is a highly skilled and competitive workforce which we may not be building.
An idle brain is a devil's workshop is an age old proverb. When livelihoods are lost, the societal and political structures may be challenged. Inequality would rear its ugly head. The World as a whole cannot afford such a situation. The solution, as I see it, would hinge on greater collaboration, technology sharing, knowledge transfer and the likes. Hope humanity wakes up to the challenges and comes out with an apt solution.
