Robot economy @ It is both a crisis and an opportunity
Driverless vehicle is a technology that has
been taunting and tantalising us for a while now. We are now told that the
driverless tractor and farm equipment is ready. The machines don’t take breaks
and can work all night. Isn’t that wonderful! Or is it?
The term ‘dual-use technology’ is used to
refer to technologies that can serve peaceful and military purposes. We need to
extend that term to also cover technologies that on the one hand can enhance a
human’s safety and convenience and, on the other, replace the human.
Vanishing jobs
President Obama recently bemoaned that
automation has weakened the ability of workers to secure jobs. At the same
time, he highlighted boosting productivity growth as a structural challenge
facing America.
Much of the campaign speeches of both major
candidates in the US presidential election have been raising the jobs issue.
Trump wants to cancel trade agreements and turn the screws on China; he
believes it has been responsible for all the job loss in the US. Even Clinton
is weakly mumbling about withdrawing support for the proposed Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership.
Obama is disappointed with potential
physicists and engineers making their careers in the financial services
industry rather than ‘innovating in the real economy.’ We have seen a lot of
wonderful innovation in the information technology-enabled sectors. You can
count Google, Facebook, WhatsApp and other companies that would top the list
and when you dig deeper you would find that they don’t employ as many people (in
relation to their revenues or market valuation) as traditional manufacturing
companies, and they also increasingly employ more people overseas Between 2001
and 2016, employment at computer and electronic firms in the US has fallen by
about 45 per cent.
Wall Street Journal has
calculated that the top five giant technology companies today employ 22 per
cent less workers than their predecessors on the top five list did in the year
2000.
Helping hands
The other silent revolution taking place
across the manufacturing and distribution sectors is in the use of robots.
Automotive companies introduced robots decades ago in their assembly lines.
Now, warehouses are using robots. Slowly, companies are beginning to use robots
as night watchmen (they don’t take breaks, sleep on the job or want benefits).
To remind us, Pratt Industries, a corrugated
box manufacturer has released full page ads in US newspapers headlining ‘Export
food, not jobs’ and that food production exceeds the auto, movie, oil and gas
industries in revenues. Perhaps Pratt has not read about the driverless
tractor, for the jobs are not going overseas but they are vanishing from the
planet. All this can really present an opportunity to an alternative set of
thinking engineers. While much of the technology developed in the
industrialised world is labour saving or substituting, engineers of the
developing world can specialise in labour supporting technologies for which
there is a crying need in most parts of the world.
Source | Business Line | 21 October
2016
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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