Whenever there is a technological advance, there’s always a fear of job loss. Technological innovations have changed the nature of jobs. The fear that it leads to job loss has not been proved, said KV Subramanian, Executive Director, International Monetary Fund, when asked if artificial intelligence would lead to job loss.
“Whenever there is an innovation that comes, we react with complacency or with fear,” he said. I don’t think the fear of AI is necessary. There will be a change in the nature of jobs., he told newspersons after the first convocation of Sai University on Wednesday.
AI will have far more impact on white collar jobs while previous innovations had impact on blue collar jobs, he said.
A country like India does need an economic model which is far more labour intensive, and not one that is basically labour substituting, he said. “A lot of us have actually learnt by observing the West, I think this is one dimension where we cannot learn as much from the West because labour is scarce in the West and they typically have relied far more on capital. But that is an area where we have to sort of think afresh,” he said.
When it comes to capital intensive versus labour intensive, every firm thinks that it should move towards a more capital intensive production method. The problem that will happen, is that cumulatively the industry will not be generating as much jobs or increasing wages and that will affect industry itself, he said. The Indian industry needs to think carefully about it and come up with more labour-intensive models of growth, he said.
