The World’s Most Populous Nation and the Myth of a Jobless Utopia

Around 180 years ago, Karl Marx fantasised about a society where the individual would be free of a vocation. He wanted people to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and be a critic after dinner. While Marx thought that this dream was possible in an ideal communist society, it might be that capitalism gets to clinch that objective.

Although there is a great deal of disagreement on when artificial intelligence (AI) will make most white-collar jobs redundant, there can’t be a denial about what is happening here and now. The biggest tech companies in the world like Meta, Amazon and Oracle are laying off tens of thousands of employees. India’s software services giants are bleeding workers and stock-market value simultaneously. Graduates of top business schools in the country aren’t landing lucrative offers by the boatloads anymore. One can go on...

The truth of the matter is that AI is rapidly improving at coding, creating slick presentations and graphics, writing memos and e-mails, summarising the takeaways of large documents, making preliminary sales calls and finding answers to customers’ problems. As these are things that constitute a significant portion of the white-collar universe, it’s not hard to read the tea leaves. An employment apocalypse is coming. When, which and how many jobs are details that won’t matter a lot in the long run.

For the past few years, OpenAI founder Sam Altman—perhaps the most recognisable face of AI—has gone around the world talking about how AI will eat up jobs. In April, his house was attacked by an anti-AI activist with a Molotov cocktail. Although Altman and some of his ilk have talked about AI ushering in a future of abundance where humans won’t need to earn a living and can pursue their passions freely, not everyone is convinced. To many it might sound as frivolous as the legend of Marie Antoinette saying “let them have cake” when bread was scarce during the French Revolution.

But the tech and finance honchos are changing their tune now. As AI-related layoffs have begun to alarm people and governments across the world, they are trying to alter the narrative to evade the backlash. From publishing memos that said “AI will take all the jobs”, they have quickly shifted to claims of “AI isn’t eating up jobs yet”. Do not fall for it. Like Intel founder and ‘father of Silicon Valley’ Andy Grove often said, only the paranoid survive.

Our cover story talks about the crisis that is already unfolding closer home. The information-technology sector, which has been the backbone of India’s middle class for the past three decades, is shedding workers. And a veteran employee is as much at risk as a fresher. This would ultimately mean unpaid loan installments, cutback on spends in supermarkets and fewer pizza orders on apps. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

India’s stakes are uniquely terrifying. We are the world’s most populous nation, with a median age of 28. Approximately 12 million young people enter the workforce every year. We could not generate enough jobs before AI. What happens now? It’s a hard question that our policymakers, industrialists and civil society need to find an answer to collectively.

Beware. It’s intellectually lazy and dishonest to think that a universal basic income will fix the discontent arising from widespread unemployment.

The desire of more and better pushes individuals, countries and human civilisation forward. A society which satiates itself with a basic income is doomed to fall apart. However much we dislike our daily drudgery, a job gives us an identity and an everyday purpose. We should not forget how Albert Camus ended The Myth of Sisyphus: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Neeraj Thakur is editor, Outlook