The Luddites are right !!- They are echoing Indian theory of Karma, without its real knowledge !!!!!

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-luddites-might-have-been-right/article6991180.ece

In the coming years, some jobs could disappear faster than others. India has to start wondering what to make of the coming technology world

Quite early in his 2012 book ‘Robots will steal your job, but that’s ok,’ author Federico Pistono presents an idea known to supporters of technology as ‘The Luddite Fallacy.’ A reference to angry English textile workers in the early 19th century who protested against imminent job losses by breaking knitting machines and other labour-saving innovations, the term is used to imply that Luddites (or those who fear technology) have got it all wrong. What it suggests, rather, is that new technology creates more jobs than it destroys. So, don’t fret.

For a long time, including a good part of the era of computers and the Internet, this argument seemed difficult to counter. Not anymore. It may have run its course, as Mr. Pistono acknowledges later in the book. And this could dramatically change the way the world functions.

Here’s some data. Technology research firm Gartner predicts software, robots and smart machines will take over one out of three jobs in another 10 years. Futurist Thomas Frey predicted a few years back that two billion jobs, half the total, will disappear by 2030.

Jobs are vulnerable

Shocking? A layman could well remember 1997, the year IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov and gave the world a glimpse of what technology is capable of. If a computer was outwitting the best of grandmasters at chess, no activity involving the intellect was going to be beyond it. And sure enough, today, all human jobs seem vulnerable. Four years back, another of IBM’s inventions, Watson, beat two champions of the quiz show ‘Jeopardy,’ which the New York Timesreported about with the lines “In the end, the humans on “Jeopardy!” surrendered meekly.” Watson-like bots abound now. For instance, if you are right now reading an Associated Press report on an earnings performance of a U.S. company, there is a good chance that it has been put together not by a journalist in flesh and blood but by a bot. The 169-year-old wire news agency last year tied up with eight-year-old, North Carolina-based Automated Insights, whose patented platform automatically turns financial data into stories. Voila!

By no means is Automated Insights the only journalism-disrupting game around. One of its more famous rivals is Narrative Science, whose co-founder believes it won’t be long before a storytelling computer programme wins a Pulitzer Prize.

Then, there is the ‘robot scientist’ Eve which promises to make drug discovery faster and cheaper. To its credit, Eve has already spotted a compound that can be used to fight malaria.

We aren’t forgetting the so-called creative jobs here. And no, they aren’t immune to the tech onslaught, as a viral video by YouTube channel CGP Grey showed last year. The video, titled ‘Humans Need Not Apply,’ brought forth the man versus machine theme, revealing toward the end that its background score was done by a bot.

If software can do journalism, compose music, discover drugs, win a quiz, drive cars, and do many other things that earlier were impossible without a human, what does it say about the coming job market? Those who believe that’s a worrying question include venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and even an artificial intelligence expert such as Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese Internet giant Baidu.

Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs, along with Boston University’s Seth Benzell, Laurence Kotlikoff and Guillermo LaGarda, have dealt with this issue in their February 2015 study ‘Robots are Us: Some Economics of Human Replacement.’ One of the fallouts of the coming in of smart machines, they note, is “a long-run decline in labour share of income.” And the report sounds a warning, indicating that in the absence of policy that redistributes from winners to losers, “smart machines can mean long-term misery for all.”

Other experts have visualised an emerging world of economic lopsidedness, where technological adoption and use could create a few big winners and many big losers. This is what could happen if someone successfully builds and markets an automated system, which while helping its maker reap handsome profits also puts many, many people out of jobs.

The Indian scenario

As always, it will be argued that India, not being a developed economy, can breathe easy. Yes, the pace of adoption of technology might be relatively slower here than in advanced economies. And yes, it is difficult to imagine driverless cars buzzing around here anytime soon. But it is important to appreciate how India Inc, the organised job-giver, has already taken well to automation.

Auto companies, for instance, have over the years increasingly used robotics, which they have found to be more cost-efficient and less problematic than labour in the long run. IT companies now are betting on automation to deal with a lot of routine stuff. Machine learning, by which software systems learn to make decisions based on data, will only make this significantly better.

In the coming years, some jobs could disappear faster than others. India, where income inequalities are already large, has to start wondering what to make of the coming technology world. For, the Luddites may be finally right.

sriram.srinivasan@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: Luddite Fallacy, software industry, job industry

• Ishan Ishan  
  

  If machines give us all the labour, there will be no such thing as labour cost, and there won't be any inflation due to increase in labour costs. Prices of manufactured products will get much much lower. We may even get products for free, because all we would need is natural resources.

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  9920

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  • Suguna  
    

    That is a ridiculous argument. There will be inflation because the natural resources are not free.

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    • Ishan Ishan  
      

      There are a lot of reasons for inflation, labour-cost is just one of them, and the labour-cost factor will certainly be eliminated if all the labour comes from machines. Natural resources are free because they are found in nature for free, but they are not available to us for free since labour is required to make them available to us. Please note that we are discussing a hypothetical situation.

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• Ramesh  
  

  Don't become so panic ,man is creative creature ,without his creativity so much progress possible?Am optimist future will very bright future generation they become more smart then us .History tilling us that Luddites always grumble when new technology emerged in society.

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  705

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• PA  
  

  Humans are Change agents, can only transform from one State to another State, Humans cannot Create like the "The Creator", If they want to build a "Car", they need to do a lot of R&D, Testing, Optimizing, make a lot of Waste that Harms the Environment. Manufacturing produces Waste, it harms the Envirnoment, etc, Computers, & IT Industry destroys the envirnoment, making Computers, keeping them running needs Energy, you need Non clean energy to run them. The Javascript you are writing now, needs your Computers to be On, all is linked Environmental degradation. You were put on this Planet, God has the right to take you off the Planet. Its not just your Planet, It belongs to all Life. If you dont have the Wisdom to be part of Nature, respect Nature, its time you went extinct. Extinct you will go.

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  435

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• N.Chellappa  
  

  Automation replaces human labour with energy driven machines. With both the population of the globe and the rate of consumption of energy and materials rising unabatedly there is bound to be point at which the present day civilization would collapse like a house of cards. It is for energy that the wars in the gulf are dragging on. As days go there will be wars for many more rare materials on which the present day civilization of intolerable level of consumption rests.

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  685

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• Ind Yeah  from Selden
  

  We shouldnt stop advancing. Instead of fearing for jobs.. govt should start population control

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• Mitra  from Ningbo
  

  It is quite pathetic to have such an article published in a top national newspaper. The Luddites have been wrong for the last 250 years and will continue to be so.

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  145

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• R S  from Elur
  

  If the IT industry loses a lot of jobs, engineering graduates may have to work in the area they studied in college. That might not be a bad thing for society.

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  155

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• Gopinathan  from Bangalore
  

  The only solution appears to be creation of social security systems that ensures no one starves, or suffers for want of shelter or healthcare, or is denied the education that helps a person appreciate the finer things of life. "Redistribution from winners to losers" as the article mentions. Ignoring reality by invoking platitudes is not going to make it go away

  2 days ago ·   (0) ·   (0) ·  reply (0) · 
  
• Csha Nambiar  from Bangalore
  

  Are we beginning to fear our own capabilities for creation? Maybe its a good thing that soon people may not have to do anything at all and can spend time in meditation (that is if we do not create the technology to wipe out the human race because some nut job is sure to use it) :P

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  175

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• Ravishankar  from Bangalore
  

  As per this article, , which talks about Polanyi's paradox related to the subject matter above. If you read the article carefully, there will be some impact on the jobs as we know today in the near future. Economies and workforce need to adjust and adapt in the future.

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• ANAND KUMAR  from Delhi
  

  Pace of tech development and it's adoption by society and larger world is only about timing. Ultimately all have Have to concede this that quality and cost of goods and services can not be left to crude labour In present competitive scenario. Scare of job loss is I'll founded as job are just redistributed and not lost altogether. India, like any other progressive nation have to embrace proven and emerging technologies otherwise we are bound to enter into an era of slavery of patented technologies of west.

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• Gopal  from Boston
  

  For the last 60 years the Luddites have been wrong but they have controlled the Indian agenda (remember the labor intensive vs capital intensive debates). So what the writer is saying is that we should continue down that same foolish path that has brought so much misery on India.

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  2850

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• Kvrao  from Annandale
  

  The good thing is as the old jobs disappear new jobs gets created. Otherwise, both Robots and humans will be without jobs. No worries!

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  745

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OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD - BE MINDFUL OF YOUR HEALTH.!!!

Yesterday I had visited one of my friends in a premier hospital in TN(India). He is in the hospital bed for a minor surgery. While I was with him, one hospital staff, donning the role of patient care/relation-ship officer had come to inquire about the general comfort of the patient and the attention received from the medical staff. He had a friendly demeanor and seemed much suitable for the job. While trying to be overtly friendly to our friend, he dropped hints about his other responsibilities. That included ordering the pharmacy drugs for the hospital.

A fact he revealed surprised me !!! That the quantity of ANTI-DEPRESSANT DRUGS bought for the hospital exceeded those other drugs needed for the treatment of diabetes. He confided that even doctors are stressed out, one reason being their attempts(studies) to keep abreast of the latest developments in their respective fields , necessitating recourse to such drugs. In this context it is to be

understood that the (working) knowledge in the medical field and in all other modern work-situations, is like shifting-sand, which adds to the stress levels. You could be sacked or sidelined at the work-place, if it gets around that you are stale !!!!

I had read elsewhere a fact regarding Europe that if one were to do a laboratory analysis of the liquid (water ?) flowing in its underground city sewers , you will find concentration of anti-depressant drugs discarded by the human-body as waste. Now we are on the threshold of such a 'revolution in healing and health-care'. Why such treatments are necessary now ? Why the mental health of our society is deteriorating !!??The patient care officer is of the opinion that most cases he knows related to prescription of anti-depressant drugs is due to psychological stress developed at the work-place !!!!

Western approach to ACTION (KARMA) , WORK , life and living is disease prone . In all ways !!!!! And we are imitating and striving to be 'in the image' of Western societies !!!!

I am not sure whether the reason for my friend's surgery is connected to his occupation,-he is the senior vice-president in the Indian arm of a US company, but his immediate bosses are you know who..............

ONE BOOK, TWO MEN, DIFFERING PERCEPTIONS & ACTIONS WHICH were POLAR OPPOSITES !!!!

“So the debate on the interpretation  of the Bhagavad Gita – whether it was concerned with the actual war on the plain of Kurukshetra or an imaginary battle  taking place in the human soul – continued to the end.  Godse believed that Krishna commanded Arjuna to engage in mortal combat with his enemies, while Ramdas

Gandhi, like his father, believed that the struggle was to be fought in the human heart.

When Godse wrote from prison: “And Arjuna actually performed what Krishna commanded,”  he was triumphantly expressing his belief  that he had acted in full conformity with the Bhagavad Gita." – excerpts from The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi by Robert Payne p. 644

One is a Chitpavan Brahmin, other is a Baniya. But whose perception of the Gita is in conformity or in tandem  with  the primary message of its author Vyasa, as given in the greater work Mahabharatha.  The primary message in the MBh  is ‘Ahimsa  paramo dharma.” Rough translation,-“ Non-violence ultimate religion.”  The MBh at its ending tries to impress upon the human mind the futility of war. Since the MBH story spans  many births of an individual, its proper understanding individually differs from person to person depending on his KARMA (To be exact, karama-vasana, which determines ones  Karma.) Sin(papa) or sinning and its extent/intensity   depends on ones negative karma-vasanas. A individual with solidified/stubborn/sticky  negative karma-vasanas carried over from many previous births is more likely to interpret the message of

Mbh/Gita, as advocating and justifying   the use of violent means even to tackle ,dharmic/righteous issues.

Gandhiji & Godse represented the top echelon of Indian society  during that particular period of time of Indian history. Their differing understanding of the essence of the Gita, represent its two limits, and is representative of the understating of the people of India, who constituted the social segment to which they belonged. But can there be any comparison between Gandhiji & Godse with respect to Indian religious/philosophical tenets !??. As a individual evolves higher and higher his “Purushaparadhams” slowly will melt away. There are as many as twenty-two purushaparadhams  such as  ones that

infuses  identity/self-consiousness  like son, husband,father, caste, social status, religion, nationality etc etc. The person for whom all this shows signs of melting is on the way to becoming a Universal soul, Mahatma. He is then likely to be misunderstood as interested ONLY in the welfare of the opponent. “About this very time he resorted to his fast unto death. Every condition given by him for giving up the fast is in favour of Muslims and against the Hinds” – Godse’s statement given to the trial court.(p.342, The Men who Killed Gandhi, Manohar Malgonkar). The insistence  by Gandhiji  to pay Rs 55 Crs

to Pakistan  withheld by the Indian Govt, proved to be the final straw  for Godse. On his part Gandhiji would have felt - Should we deny the way-ward son his share of the family property !!???

Now imagine the game of snake & ladder. Spiritual evolution & liberation is guaranteed for all who takes embodiment,  but unfortunately here Godse who had been  progressing   in this climb, had stepped off from the ladder into the mouth of the snake. His  intense karma-vasanas had made him commit a political murder. An Upanishad reminds us that spiritual journey is like walking on the razors edge.

Though we believe that the Mahatma  according to his own interpretation of the Gita, proved its efficacy, by winning freedom non-violently for India,(the amplitude of this important event in history, is getting  amplified  itself with the passage of time) which in-turn inspired Martin Luther King  & Nelson Mandela, it is Godse’s path that majority of the world follows.  Gandhiji having properly understood the Gita, had urged

the masses to reduce their karma-vasanas by engaging in hand-spinning and other kinds of manual labour. This is one way for ordinary folks, who constitute the majority to reduce their karma-vasanas. But unwittingly, the modern world and its people went in the opposite direction behind machinery, which had the effect of increasing and making stubborn   the population’s vasanas.  The result,  the increase in violence in Geometric Progression !!!!!