AI advancements may change future job scenario- Raghuram Rajan
Former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan talked about the effect of technology on industrial jobs in the industrial world, at a Kerala Govt summit in Kochi on 23rd of March 2018. He was speaking in his current capacity as a professor of finance at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. He highlighted that he could lose his job only when super-robots begin to teach at universities.
Raghuram Rajan highlighted the disappearing jobs in the industrial sectors as a result of automation and the popular anxiety arising out of it. He outlined the fact of machines taking over many jobs performed by the humans, as these machines acquired the AI to do the human-like tasks in the industry.
He pointed out that the National Health Service in the UK is using Big Data analytics for medical analysis that was earlier done by the doctors. However, the speed at which high tech would take over the manual work may be slower than expected, according to Rajan. This may be because of lack of resources, preference for human touch and the people not wanting this kind of change.
In case of developing countries like India, AI may not threaten manual jobs because the entire production and manufacture industries are often manually managed. It would not be cost effective to transfer these hand-crafted manufactures to AI in a developing country such as India. However, Rajan stressed that people had to be ready to adapt to the coming change.
For example, India makes the kinds of handicrafts that no other country in the world makes and all of them are hand-crafted, hence the word “handicraft.” Agriculture can use modern tech to a great extent, but this means that large farms with large-scale production capacities have to be established, which may not gel with the land-holding family structures of India.
“I still think there is space (in export-led growth). We should be seizing that space, but we shouldn’t be losing out other spaces, for example, tech startups, to other countries,” said Rajan.
Image Courtesy - Monishborah.com
