Income Inequality will increase with Automation

We are Greenworldinvestor have been warning that India sits on a powder keg of a massive employement crisis, as more than 1 million workers join India every month from the huge ranks of its youth. India is being hard pressed to retain jobs of its existing workers given the increase in automation, which has become the major trend worldwide. With the rapid growth of technology and robotics, it is increasingly becoming economical to replace workers with robots. This trend is accelerating at a rapid pace and even white collar complex work is starting to be replaced by computers with artificial intelligence.

This is also accentuating the trend of global inequality where the rich become richer and poor become poorer. With labor losing its advantage over capital, workers are not only being faced with low wages but with no wage and no job at all. Reskilling will not help, as you can’t make a data scientist of a welding technician. And even if you managed to do that, the world does not require millions of data scientists.

Huge segments of the population like drivers face a very dark future as automous vehicles become cheaper and safer to use than human driven vehicles. Same will be the case with numerous other proffesions. Even as the global population continues to climb, the number of workers required continues to reduce. Though this will increase productivity, the profits will continue to accrue to a few leaving out the billions in the cold. World Bank is also now warning of this trend, which becomes a huge threat to countries like India which are still stuck in a low income per capita state. While the Indian government wants to replicate the development template of other countries by shifting people from agriculture to industry, this will not work given that industries don’t require workers.

“But the traditional economic path from increasing productivity of agriculture to light manufacturing and then to full-scale industrialisation may not be possible for all developing countries,” Kim said in response to a question at the Brookings Institute during a discussion on extreme poverty yesterday.

“In large parts of Africa, it is likely that technology could fundamentally disrupt this pattern. Research based on World Bank data has predicted that the proportion of jobs threatened in India by automation is 69 per cent, in China it is 77 per cent and in Ethiopia, the percentage of jobs threatened by automation is 85 per cent,” he said.

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