Technology will cause mass displacement of people who will have to learn new skills. This may not ensure jobs but will at least lead to the discovery of the inner self
Artificial intelligence (AI) and robots are going to kill a lot of jobs because in the future, it will be done by machines”. These words, spoken by co-founder and executive chairman of the Alibaba group, Jack Ma, at the World Economic Forum, brings into sharp focus a reality that the world has often chosen to avoid: That technology will cause a mass-scale displacement of people, who will have to learn new skills to keep themselves employable. It is also a fact that there's no formulaic prescription for these new skills, nor any guarantee that learning them would automatically ensure jobs.
When it comes to India Inc, the prognosis is particularly grim. last year, McKinsey & Company published a report that sent shock-waves through the IT sector. The report predicted that over the next three years, as many as six lakh IT jobs would be lost to technology-driven innovations, primarily automation. Backing this up, and adding business process outsourcing and knowledge process outsourcing to the mix, HfS Research, a leading US-based research firm, increased the number to seven lakh.
Finally, as the financial year drew to a close, a study by Teamlease Services, focusing on the Indian manufacturing sector, forecasted that over the next five years, 25-30 per cent of the existing jobs in the IT sector could potentially fall under the anvil of automation. If the full brunt of these predictions amounts to an earthquake waiting to happen, its tremors have already been felt along the fault-lines. Information Technology, which for two decades has been at the vanguard of the country's ‘economic miracle’ narrative, saw widespread retrenchment in the last financial year. To stem the panic tide, stakeholders have at times put out statements such as: “Those employees are being re-trained in automation, for future deployment.” That platitudes like these are misleading is easy to see.
For instance, if 100 IT professionals are rendered from their usual day-jobs redundant due to automation, a solution cannot be arrived at by simply retraining all of them on automation techniques, since by definition, automation requires a significantly fewer number of people (say 20) to do the same job. In this situation, mass scale re-training in such a scenario would at best create fresh surplus of professionals trained in a niche domain. Often, employees, thus displaced from their regular roles, are kept in a state of marginalised limbo and then after a discreet interval, are let off.
The effect of retrenchment is truly debilitating. An acute cash crunch, heightened anxiety levels, deteriorating state of depression, low self-esteem, and the complete erosion of motivation and self-confidence are some of the most obvious outcomes. Added to this is the dire lack of a support system in India which could provide reliable, helpful and anonymous psychological counselling to a large number of individuals. The situation is exacerbated, since for every working professional actually getting the axe, there are multiple colleagues who are compelled to undergo almost the same level of emotional and psychological distress.
There are no neat, simple solutions. And even ideas, that are likely to work, are at best options, suggestions, and not answers. But two fundamental aspects can be worked upon to get back on one's feet if the worst has happened. One is to develop an ability to look at the external environment, at the ecosystem, realistically and dispassionately, without judgement, anxiety-pangs or rancour.
To realise that the workplace paradigm has changed irrevocably, that unjust as it may seem, the skills of old that one has worked so hard over the years to master, may have very swiftly become redundant, and that the triumphs and vicissitudes of the past no longer provide an accurate portent of things to come. In a deep, existential sense, one is on one's own.
This realisation, however hard, may lead naturally to a second, intensely more personal, inner journey: Rediscovering one's true signature strengths, getting back in touch with those passions that one may have left behind during the student days, mapping one's strengths to those passions, and then slowly, methodically, working out how and to what extent those strengths can be of tangible value in the market. Admittedly, it's an arduous journey, fraught with trips and falls, but finally, this is one that is emotionally healing, nourishing and self-sustaining.
Aldous Huxley, in his classic work Brave New World, presented a vision of a futuristic dystopia, unredeemed by either love or hope. Of the many passages in that book that have since become part of the literary cult, one line stands out as a stark warning: “No social stability without individual stability.” Whether the swelling millions of displaced and disgruntled professionals at the workplace will ever get immured into accepting a state of permanent uncertainty, redundancy and diminished self-worth remains to be seen. But it's a quotation that policy-makers and giant corporations, adducing promises to waves of hopeful students and professionals, would do well to keep in mind.
(The writer is Business Adviser and co-author of book, ‘From Command To Empathy: Using EQ in the Age of Disruption’)
