What is indian jobless future
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Explanation:
We are heading towards a jobless future: is it good or bad?
Vivek Wadhwa
November 3, 2016 11 min
Edit Note: How large is the threat of job losses through automation and artificial intelligence? Which sectors or industries are likely to be the hardest hit? How will the dynamics of disruption play out in different nations? And need a jobless future be such a bad thing? As we start a new weekly series on the future of jobs on FactorDaily, Indian-American technology entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa examines all this and more.
Autodesk CEO Carl Bass once said to me: “The factory of the future will have only two employees: a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”
Well, the day that Bass was speaking about is not very far away. Although he was speaking of the future of manufacturing, his statement applies to jobs in general. Automation is approaching a point at which robots can do the same physical tasks as humans, only much better and faster.
The reality is that we are facing a jobless future: one in which most of the work done by humans will be done by machines. Robots will drive our cars, manufacture our goods, and do our chores, but there won’t be much work for human beings.
The operating cost of some robots is already less than the salary of humans. That gap will widen. Boston Consulting Group predicts, for example, that by 2025, the operating cost of a robot that does welding will be less than $2 per hour, hardly comparable with the $25 that a human welder earns today in the US or even the pay of workers in the lowest-income countries. Already, with robots, the cost of manufacturing in the US is on par with that in China, where wages have been increasing faster than those of Indian IT workers.
As well, unlike human beings, robots don’t complain, join labour unions, or get distracted. It no longer makes senses for western companies to send raw materials to China to have Chinese workers assemble them into finished goods, or to outsource work to India, when their own robots can do the same work at the same or a lower price.
The reality is that we are facing a jobless future: one in which most of the work that humans do at present will be done by machines. This is a world in which advances in technology facilitate almost unlimited energy, food, and clean water; in which advances in medicine allow us to live longer and healthier lives; in which robots drive our cars, manufacture our goods, and do our chores. But there isn’t much work in it for human beings.