Labor Arbitrage RIP (indiadispatch.com) 56
An anonymous reader shares a report: For decades, India's economic promise has rested on its demographic dividend -- the competitive edge of a massive, young, and increasingly educated workforce. Economists and policymakers have routinely cited the country's population profile as its ticket to economic superpower status, with projections of reaching $10 trillion in GDP and achieving high-income status by 2047. These forecasts depend heavily on a critical assumption: that roughly 500 million Indians currently aged 5-24 will find productive employment as they enter the workforce over the next two decades. But a sobering new analysis from Bernstein suggests this fundamental premise may be crumbling under the weight of rapid advances in AI.
"The advent of AI threatens to erode all the advantages of India's rich demographic dividend," write Bernstein analysts Venugopal Garre and Nikhil Arela, who characterize their assessment as a potential "doomsday scenario" for a nation that has hitched its economic wagon to services-led growth. At stake is India's $350 billion services export sector -- a sprawling ecosystem of IT outsourcing, business process management, and offshore knowledge centers that employs over 10 million workers, mostly in jobs that place them in the top 25% of the country's income distribution.
While India's IT giants have successfully navigated previous technological shifts -- from basic call centers in the late 1980s to cloud computing and data analytics more recently -- AI poses a fundamentally different challenge. Unlike earlier transitions that required human adaptation, today's AI systems threaten to replace rather than complement the workforce. "AI subscriptions that come at a fraction of the costs of India's entry level engineers can be deployed to perform tasks at higher precision and speed," the report note.
"The advent of AI threatens to erode all the advantages of India's rich demographic dividend," write Bernstein analysts Venugopal Garre and Nikhil Arela, who characterize their assessment as a potential "doomsday scenario" for a nation that has hitched its economic wagon to services-led growth. At stake is India's $350 billion services export sector -- a sprawling ecosystem of IT outsourcing, business process management, and offshore knowledge centers that employs over 10 million workers, mostly in jobs that place them in the top 25% of the country's income distribution.
While India's IT giants have successfully navigated previous technological shifts -- from basic call centers in the late 1980s to cloud computing and data analytics more recently -- AI poses a fundamentally different challenge. Unlike earlier transitions that required human adaptation, today's AI systems threaten to replace rather than complement the workforce. "AI subscriptions that come at a fraction of the costs of India's entry level engineers can be deployed to perform tasks at higher precision and speed," the report note.
We are running out of work (Score:5, Insightful)
Like somebody said, I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes...
Re: We are running out of work (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep hearing that all work is about to disappear all the time with my left ear, while I hear about the unsurmountable labor shortage with my right.
Which is it this week?
Re: Fire boomers and get rid of H1Bs (Score:2, Insightful)
Jobs crisis ideas I put together in 2010 (Score:2)
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... [pdfernhout.net]
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and
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I don't know about the "lazy and entitled" part.
It is true that there is a lot less manual labor required today than 50 years ago. Probably in a few years a lot of menial "brain" work will also be obsolete, similar to a lot of paperwork vanishing due to the networked applications that became possible on the ruins of the first dot-com.
The outcome of this rise in productivity has mostly been appropriated by people who got lucky. A small part has gone to some who were involved in the process. Most people have
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You critic H1Bs in this meandering rant but never once note that Americans have become lazy
So which is it, this week, from Leftist HQ?
Are employers rapacious so we all need to be pushed into unions,
-or-
is it that American workers are "lazy" and need to be replaced with hungry third worlders?
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You need to start blaming the millennials.
Since when did they ever stop?
/s
Last I checked, Millennials were the direct cause of all of the economic crises the US has faced in the last decade due to their avocado toast obsession.
Of course you could blame the C-Levels and shareholders responsible for making these layoffs to line their own pockets.....
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I keep hearing that all work is about to disappear all the time with my left ear, while I hear about the unsurmountable labor shortage with my right.
Which is it this week?
Both. There are labor shortages because there aren't enough people willing to work for what companies are willing to pay to get that work done. And AI is going to effectively destroy many of the remaining jobs that currently pay a decent salary.
For the most part, AI isn't going to reduce the number of jobs except for jobs that require limited training or intellect. In fact, it might even increase the total number of jobs. Rather, what it will do is shift the jobs right, making jobs that previously requi
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As technology improves, the race to the bottom moves forward.
The only viable solution I can imagine is UBI, but implementing that will require a working democracy.
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And AI is going to effectively destroy
Yeah, like everything else so far did.
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And AI is going to effectively destroy
Yeah, like everything else so far did.
If you're being sarcastic, know that this very much has happened.
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Re: We are running out of work (Score:2)
Yes the jobs that it helps the most with are the less skilled ones, but that means I need less of those people. The higher level design and architecture my senior team does just gets more valuable by contrast.
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How do you see AI reducing the training required for jobs? Perhaps transiently, for example a call center worker who needs less training, but I think in most of those cases the job goes away entirely.
But now, those folks can use generative AI to become crappy low-end programmers writing tests for a software company, or to become staff writers for Associated Press, or whatever. They move up to higher-level jobs because they can, and the lowest-end jobs go away and are *maybe* replaced by higher-end jobs, though that's the giant open question.
Yes the jobs that it helps the most with are the less skilled ones, but that means I need less of those people. The higher level design and architecture my senior team does just gets more valuable by contrast.
Except that the AI also gets better at helping people with less training to do that design and architecture work, which means more people become capable of doing th
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Except that the AI also gets better at helping people with less training to do that design and architecture work, which means more people become capable of doing that work, which means the value to the firm declines, and the salary they pay declines with it.
As the overall productivity of the people increase, there are more people who can do the work at each level, so perversely, it encourages companies to pay them less.
I'm not sure that part is true—or at least true only with major caveats. The people I see who skip the basics and try to do design and architecture do it the way LLMs do it: superficial pattern matching. This lets you solve simple problems by gluing together off-the-shelf parts. Without understanding the fundamentals, however, the solutions tend to be stupendously inefficient. I used to be in the 'compute is cheap' camp, and when you compare Java vs. optimized C in a business app, that's generally tr
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Easy: there's extreme shortage of senior developers with 20 years of experience who will work 80-hour work-weeks at will for minimum wage and no benefits.
So that's not what you're hearing (Score:2)
Now if you literally just read the headlines of stories and don't go even to the first paragraph yeah you might have heard that. When I say something like, we are running out of work, yeah I'm clearly trying to get your attention. That's how headli
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Re:We are running out of work (Score:4, Interesting)
The quote is apparently from Joanna Maciejewka (she does not have a wikipedia page yet): “You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
Re: We are running out of work (Score:2)
Just think of a supermarket guard -- how soon do you think that AI will be able to identify shoplifters from live images with the same accuracy as the stupidest human in that position?
Today. But a shitstorm will ensue if the AI identifies the "wrong" class of person.
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The security guard at the front of the store isn't there to do anything. They are strictly there to observe and explain to people why they should follow the rules. Most are to old to actually stop anyone from doing anything and the companies that hire them don't want lawsuits for preventing theft anyway.
It's literally security theater.
Re: We are running out of work (Score:2)
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We've been automating everything we could get our hands on for 50 years
I would argue it's been more like 200 years. What "we could get our hands on" has been increasing much more rapidly lately.
This is nothing. Wait for the robots. (Score:2)
Right now it's just an elite of coders and IT nerds that are getting rationalized away. We are a small sliver of the general workforce, even in India. The real party begins when autonomous driving and general-purpose robots take over production, logistics and the trades. That's going to be epic compared to what's happening just now. I'm not quite sure how rough and extreme the transition is going to be.
Re: We are running out of work (Score:2)
So, become an electrician [slashdot.org].
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I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes...
Find something useful to do with your life. If it is actually useful, someone will pay you to do it for them.
We are not all equally talented. We are good at some things, not-so-good at others. You do what you are good at, and I do what I am good at, and we pay each other to do things. We can call it an "economy".
If nobody wants to pay you for what you want to do -do something else. There is plenty of work, we just don't want to do it.
P.S. The machines already do most of the work of laundry and dishes f
India has been a lie for a long time. (Score:1)
India hasn't been a real country ever, it's always been cheap labor and overpopulation. They still poop in holes, rivers and live like caveman for the most part. Not sure who you can blame for this, maybe the british or the east India company for their occupation of India. Either way, AI is ready to replace Indian workers as it is right now, it could use better integration support but that's not far away.
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I've been to India and, while the pollution and overpopulation are indeed very bad, I would say India is more civilized than my USA in many ways and economically better too - many goods and pretty much all services are supirior in quality and far cheaper. The healthcare may not be quite as good, but it is actually affordable, unlike here. There are many goods and services that poor people can obtain in India which only the rich can get in America.
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I suppose it depends on what goods you're looking at. In machine tools, for example, castings are often of such low quality and porous that if you look at them wrong they'll crack and fall apart.
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Maybe I should have said Consumer Goods and not Industrial goods.
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What quality would you get in the USA if you bought from the cheapest supplier?
Re:India has been a lie for a long time. (Score:4, Insightful)
...and economically better too
...Aaaand you just lost any form of credibility. India's middle class is a tiny fraction of our own in terms of share of the population. Most people over there are quite poor by first world standards, hence us referring to India as belonging to the "developing world". Trying to spin that as "economically better" than the US is laughable.
Not just AI... (Score:1)
Robotics as well. If you have cheap energy + robotics + AI, then manual labor becomes as redundancy.
OMG INDIA IS DOOOOOOOOOOMED! (Score:2)
india got this far and can’t figure a way out because AI is going to eat their lunch? get serious. maybe just maybe they could lean into AI solutions for businesses. or if consensus in the country says AI is money loser, they could stay the course.
DOOOOOOMED! hahahahaha
Get off my lawn! (Score:5, Funny)
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Why, I remember the good ol' days when you could get a REAL Indian on the phone for tech support! Not your new-fangled AI!
Which hilariously highlights the problem, lol ... there's pretty much no way that the AI can be worse ...
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Why, I remember the good ol' days when you could get a REAL Indian on the phone for tech support! Not your new-fangled AI!
Which hilariously highlights the problem, lol ... there's pretty much no way that the AI can be worse ...
Pretty much this.
The problem with India is that it wants to pretend it's got a much higher level of education that it really does... and various cultural issues that prevent work from being done.
That isn't to say there aren't some very smart and capable Indians, you probably know a few, they're the ones working here as your colleagues (particularly in the UK and commonwealth nations). Most of the ones good enough to replace you choose to get a job along side you... and get paid the same as you. The no
It's amazing what kind of doom fiction we get (Score:2)
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I did the same too, in the early 2000's. I too predicted that AI/ML would automate many skilled jobs in 10 years. I still remember, I stayed glued to the computer to watch DARPA grand challenge live. And when Highlander and Stanley finished the race successfully, I believed that automated driving is near and here. Eventually Google bought team Stanley after Urban Challenge and predicted fully autonomous vehicles by 2015. There is one hell of a difference between building a prototype that can do something re
morphing (Score:2)
Population timebomb (Score:2)
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