Saturday, December 02, 2017

Tech disruptions and impact on society

The world is said to be disrupting, and once more due to technology.
There was a time when computers made the jobs of data entry and space/process for manual archival redundant.
But this in turn reduced the costs associated with running a business and led to many not opening up; in turn this led to more number of jobs being created.

There have been social impacts due to this: society became more consumption-driven. Less cooking is happening at home and refrigerators, microwave ovens, washing machines have become a staple at homes. This meant the cost of living went up and both husband and wife had to work. This in turn is leading to filial tensions and less care and attention involved in the upbringing of the next generation. This is the state of things as it stands now.

Now they said AI will take away some more jobs. First the white collar rudimentary ones like on-call customer service that has already started. Then the complex blue collar ones that machines already hadn't like that of house maids.

While this has to lead to opening of new sectors, this is not necessarily a wave that will lead to the opening of newer sectors.
The bulk of any population is the middle class. When their jobs are at stake there will be a lot of heartburn. The previous data entry disruption or the e-commerce boom did not really touch the bulk of blue collared. That had been done and consolidated by the industrial revolution a century ago.

There is the other risk of machine learning being a continuous process and gulping more jobs than one can fathom.

It behoves nations to have the vision and enforce strict population planning. And to give visible benefits thereof by providing free high quality education to be skilled enough to ride the wave of controlling machines than being controlled/replaced by them!

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