Avainish Persaud writes: Prime Minister Narenda Modi’s declaration on the ramparts of the Red Fort last year that the world should come and make products in India, did not upset workers. Rightly or wrongly, they do not worry that India will eat their lunch. They are convinced that machines are already doing so.
What kept the angst in check was that while robots were increasingly doing complex things, like IBM’s Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov at chess, they couldn’t get the hang of simple things. Computers could make human tasks easier but they could not do away with the human altogether and so a Nobel Laureate was able to say that “we see the computer age everywhere except for the productivity statistics”.
But after 50 years of the application of Moore’s Law—where the power of computers doubles every 18 months—that barrier has finally cracked.
Amazon’s Kiva Robots lift shelves that weigh around 1,360kg, 24×7, without a toilet break, lunch hour, health insurance or pension plan. No surprise then that the world’s largest manufacturer of electronic products, Taiwan’s Foxconn, is considering replacing its workforce with one million “Foxbots”.
Economists tend to reject the lump of labour idea—that there are only so many jobs and if they no longer exist people would not have work. Back in 1810, 90% of the US workforce was employed in agriculture. Today it is just 2% and the 88% are not unemployed. Yet John Maynard Keynes said our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outruns the pace at which we find new uses for labour.
Some believe this process has been underway for a while and underscores a secular stagnation and worsening inequality in the advanced economies. The typical worker in the US has not seen a rise in their living standards since 1979 and since then income inequality has steadily worsened.
The rise of robots also questions whether this is the time for India to don the overalls of the world’s manufacturer and for Indian workers to compete against the Foxbots. In 1983, Wassily Leontief, the economist, predicted that the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.
Is the geography of manufacturing not about to change from production economies of scale to a world in which consumers pay to download the software that allows their robot to make the product they want? In which case is this not the time to build on India’s brand as a software powerhouse?
Perhaps the government should eliminate the high barriers to doing things in India, whatever it may be, and redistributing enough income to provide greater equality of opportunity for as many as possible. If the robots are coming, we should not try to compete against them or hide from them. We should embrace them, write their code, own them or tax their owners.
