Panelists: Siddhartha Singh (second from left in image), Ashwini Mahajan, Arun Kumar, Dilip Chenoy and Dharmkirti Joshi.

 

THE LEAP in technology that is taking place with breakthroughs such as artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to create both more employment and better quality jobs going ahead, according to experts who participated in a panel discussion at the India Today awards function.

 

KPMG India CEO Arun Kumar said while some people may lose jobs as technology advances the real story is that overall more jobs will be created as we move ahead.

 

He cited the example of the typewriter which has now been phased out but has only led to more typing work being done now. More fonts and various features are being used to embellish written work which has only increased the number of such jobs, he pointed out.

 

Similarly AI will give rise to the need for more work as new opportunities will open up as a result of the new technology.

 

The panelists agreed that the Indian automotive sector was a typical example where advanced technology had inducted in the manufacturing segment but a large number of jobs had been created in the ancillary industries of the auto sector and the after sales service segment. As many as 20 million jobs have been created in the auto sector after the robotic technology was introduced in the manufacturing process at large plants, Kumar said.

 

FICCI secretary general Dilip Chenoy said that data for the last 140 years shows that technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed.

 

Crisil chief economist Dharmkirti Joshi said AI represented the fourth industrial revolution. While the first revolutions replaced muscle power with machines, AI is about replacing brain power with machines at the cognitive level. He said the digital age is different from the earlier technology as quick re-skilling was required to meet the technological change. In order to be quick enough the re-skilling would have to take place on the job to prevent the workers from becoming irrelevant.

 

While the first revolutions replaced muscle power with machines, AI is about replacing brain power with machines — DHARMKIRTI JOSHI, CRISIL CHIEF ECONOMIST

 

In other areas, new technology in the construction sector was creating more jobs as a large number of people from the agriculture sector had got employment in these new projects, he added.

 

Quale Infotech founder Sidhartha Singh said in the IT sector over the last 20 years the work was being broken down to simple jobs and fresh graduates were being used to do these easy tasks. However, the change has now been so quick that it is difficult to re-skill these workers. Estimates show that as much as 70 per cent of the current workforce in the IT sector cannot be re-skilled to deal with the new technologies.

 

Ashwani Mahajan, national co-convenor of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch was of the view that not enough attention was being paid to create jobs in the villages where 70 per cent of the country’s population lives. He said that all these people cannot be accommodated in the cities and had to be given employment in their respective villages through dairy farming, fisheries, and poultry.