(UPSC Essay prompt 2015)
Arvind and Raj disembark from the metro and walk into an empty cafe. The year is 2109. Raj grabs two cups of freshly roasted coffee and pays with a wink at the retina scan counter, while Arvind takes a seat and adjusts the music player. "You should come taste the coffee growing in my garden some day," says Raj, "our new Microsoft plantation system is really good!" Arvind nods with a smile, enjoying the song playing in the background, which was composed and personalized for him by Spotify AI at just that instant. He finally speaks, "My kid doesn't wanna enroll for the Physics PhD on Antimatter research - says the field will soon be automated." Arvind frowns, breathes out a sigh, and gloomily mutters, "I wonder if one day, technology will entirely replace manpower?"
We would be ill-advised to limit the scope of technology to merely some mechanized equipment or the next-gen artificial intelligence. In the (paraphrased) wisdom of Shri Ranchoddas Shamaldas Chanchad, "Everything from the tip of a pen to the zip of your jeans, is a machine technology." The evolution of technology has been so gradual yet so encompassing that it has penetrated every sector of human endeavor, while being hidden in plain sight. From the invention of the wheel to that of internet, technology has upgraded human civilization one step at a time, by adding to the collective productivity of humankind. But does the same technology also end up turning manpower obsolete?
Technology is almost by definition a way to improve the efficiency of human effort. Intuition then suggests that with improved efficiency, use of manpower must fall. This, however, is a textbook case of the Jevons paradox: when the efficiency of usage of a resource increases (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand. This counter-intuitive phenomenon has occurred over and over in history. During the Industrial Revolution, the invention of efficient engines exponentiated the usage of coal, rather than drive it down. Despite Moore's law dictating a doubling of transistor efficiency on computer chips, the consumption of transistors (and chips) has not fallen but grown over the decades!
Following the same line of thought, manpower can also be seen as a resource whose efficiency has been steadily growing over centuries. Construction of buildings is one of the frontrunners in technology-enabled automation, yet USA, one of the most developed of countries, adds about 1.2 million construction workers to its economy every year! It took 20,000 workers somewhere between 12 to 22 years to build the Taj Mahal in the seventeenth century, whereas merely 10,000 workers built the Burj Khalifa in only 6 years. Without a doubt, construction efficiency has steeply increased, but we are building a lot more in the twenty first century. The population of India when the Taj Mahal was built is roughly the same as the number of industrial workers in the country today, i.e., 130 million!
Wrapping our heads around the Jevons paradox thus helps us see technology not as a replacement, but an augmentation of manpower. With the countless man-hours and energy saved due to efficient tools and machinery, humankind better employs it elsewhere. We have scaled up industrial activity, pursued scientific research, and addressed social issues such as inequality, healthcare, and education.
There are certain aspects of human effort that have indeed been entirely replaced by technology. Manual Scavenging is one such work. Before the invention and widespread usage of plumbing and sanitation facilities, urban dwellers across the world were forced to clean up their toilets on a daily basis. It was even more unfortunate that such undesired jobs usually fell to the poor and/or oppressed sections of the society. Social initiatives by leaders like Gandhiji helped to some extent by dismantling the taboo around these menial jobs. But it was technology that did (and continues to) remove the need for such employment at all.
Another undesired job which is slowly getting automated is that of defusing bombs. Militaries around the world are incorporating unmanned robots which are remotely controlled for defusing bombs, without risking the precious lives of soldiers.
To recapitulate, some forms of manpower such as construction, evolve into highly efficient processes with the adoption of efficiency-improving tools and machines. Other forms of work which are neither lucrative nor creative, end up getting automated. It is safe to assume that all jobs involving drudgery are due to be outsourced to technology. The question of consequence is therefore not if technology will replace (certain forms of) manpower, but when and how? Can we collectively draft policies that inhibit the potential ill effects of such a replacement?
To study and influence the effect of automation on an economy and its constituent people, it is important to emphasize its time scale. Most technological advancements are incremental, thereby providing the employees of an outgoing sector with ample time to transition and make peace with a new way of living. Manual scavengers, or their elected leaders, could observe the shrinking demand for scavenging with the rise of plumbing, and encourage the next generation to learn other skills. With the adoption of robots, militaries could similarly ease up on bomb-defusal training for new recruits.
However, other sectors of employment are not equally fortunate. With large scale consolidation of farms and development of high yielding varieties, agriculture all over the world is becoming an overcrowded occupation. Technology here acts as a force to disbalance the supply-demand equilibrium, and doing so very quickly leads to loss of employment. The internet was one such technological jump - which abruptly transformed several industries. Retail stores saw a stiff competition from e commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart. The traditional cab driving industry, including the famous yellow taxi of London, saw a shrinking clientele with the influx of cab aggregators like Uber, Lyft, and Ola. Cinemas and multiplexes were likewise taken head on by OTT streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.
Often, this battle between new tech and manpower ends up ugly, with labour union strikes, or farmer suicides owing to a lack of profitability. To add fuel to fire, venture capitalists push hard in favor of new tech by waging price wars which, despite being loss-making themselves, hurt the traditional workforce more - driving them out of competition.
Note how policy can be a decisive factor in slowing down technology's replacement of manpower, thereby alleviating the associated risks. When the Green Revolution started in India in 1966, the government introduced Minimum Support Price (MSP) as a protective cushion to help farmers accustom themselves to the ongoing changes. Anti-competitive price wars are likewise regulated by authorities, such as the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). Similarly, tariffs on imports can help local industries bear stiff competition from technological advancements or price subsidies elsewhere in the globalized world.
Another relevant question arises as to how certain jobs are automated. Does technology end up causing more harm than good, if left to its own devices? The recent Boeing plane crashes caused by autopilot errors, or the infamous Tesla driverless car accident - are excellent case studies. They highlight cases where human intelligence could have averted disasters but an over-reliance on technology proved fatal. There are also more subtle cases, where automatic systems act with a bias against marginalized groups. ProPublica, for instance, was a parole prediction system used by American judges for years before being shown to be racially biased: it predicted a Black person to be a lot more likely to skip parole than a White person with otherwise similar characteristics.