How the Indian workforce can beat the robots taking their jobs

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Ned Ludd was a textile worker in 18th century England. He was a regular fellow, just like you and I, who happened to like his job; in fact, he loved it. So when the industrial revolution brought forth inventions like automated textile equipment, his job was threatened like never before. One day, in what was described as a “fit of passion,” Ludd smashed two mechanical knitting machines to the ground. This began the rebellion of Luddites.

Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of automated looms and knitting frames. But today “Luddite” is a term with a rather infamous meaning – people who fear new technology.

Ned Ludd’s story encapsulates the idea that as long as machines have existed, economists and workers alike have feared that they are making humans obsolete. Just as previous industrial revolutions threatened jobs and livelihoods with technology, the “fourth industrial revolution” is making a case for replacing humans with more efficient algorithms and automation at the workplace.

The future is now

As technologies like cloud, IoT, AI, and big data continue to grow, the role of machines as “tools” to increase productivity is fading. Instead, machines are becoming workers.

Take, for instance, Amazon’s Kiva robots which can plan, control, and navigate to fill warehouse orders four times faster than their previous system. Or IBM’s Watson which processes up to 60 million pages of text per second and produces medical diagnoses and treatment recommendations. Or The Grid, an AI website design platform where “AI websites design themselves.”

The future is here and it’s uncertain.

The future is here and it’s uncertain. It’s even more disturbing when you think about what machines can take away from you. For instance, a blend of AI and big data analytics can help computers “learn” how to create and curate content that’s tailored for hundreds of thousands of customers – something a marketer can never do.

If you think I’m wildly exaggerating here, this is what the esteemed ex-governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had to say about automation:

“The emerging threat is not the guy in Bengaluru but the robot next door who’s going to take your job.” – Raghuram Rajan

And if your job requires repetitive work, more bad news for you. A study found that India’s IT services industry will lose 640,000 “low-skilled” jobs (i.e., repetitive jobs that require following a set process) to automation in the next five years. Obviously, a bot can handle such work better than you without even breaking a sweat.

To give you a glimpse of the future, ICICI Bank has made a move to automate 20 percent of transactions by March next year and Raymond, an Indian fashion retailer, is set to replace 10,000 human workers with robots in the next three years.

A faulty skill set

While automation may cast a scary shadow on jobs, we have more pressing issues at home. According to a report, only 17.91 percent of Indian engineers were employable for the software services sector, 3.67 percent for software products, and 40.57 percent for a non-functional role such as BPO.

The skill gap in our young workforce was never clearer than when 19,000 graduates applied for 114 vacancies for sweepers in Amroha, Uttar Pradesh this year. That’s as shocking as a statistic can get. And when you combine this skill-gap with automation, it’s not hard to imagine the blow on our workforce.

Hope over the horizon

The magic you need