The Dystopian Decade Ahead: Exponential Tech Will Destroy Jobs, Democracy And The State Itself

The misunderstanding most aggressively promoted — including by AI companies themselves — is that there will be net job creation.

The decade ahead is a dystopian one, irrespective of whether you sit on the techno-optimist or the doomsayer side of the debate. The fundamental relationships that hold up our economy are changing right before our eyes, and the system has not even begun to acknowledge it. These cataclysmic shifts are unfolding in real time, and because they are unfolding in real time, we cannot see their full impact on our society, economy and lives.

Take the relationship between capital investment and job creation. This relationship has been broken for over a decade. Every other country has at least recognised it; some have started to address it. In India, the system continues to behave as if the 1990s never ended. States hand out land, incentives and tax holidays based on the size of the capital investment announced, not the number of jobs actually created. Every year, each state hosts its own investment festival, where top industrialists are almost forced to announce large investments. A few years ago, while running a multi-state newspaper, we did the math: the actual investment was less than 1 percent of the announced number in the first year, and less than 0.1 percent by the second. That is a different scandal.

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Coming back to the broken relationship between capital invested and jobs created — if the investment is in manufacturing, the higher the capital deployed, the more automation on the shop floor, and the fewer people employed. A semiconductor plant is the textbook illustration. Because of the strict air-conditioning parameters — no pollutants are allowed — there is nobody on the shop floor. The handful of people employed are all behind consoles. Tens of billions of dollars in capital equipment result in direct employment of fewer than 100 people at the plant level. The same trend is visible from cement plants to steel plants. Automation is rising rapidly, human headcount is dropping exponentially, and the combination of AI and robotics is going to push this even further. This is not a future scenario. It is the current reality. Automation in manufacturing is already in its fourth generation. AI in services is in its third. Both are now growing exponentially.

This brings us to the dishonest comparison that AI optimists keep deploying — that we have seen this before, that every wave of technology has destroyed some jobs and created more. The shift from agriculture to manufacturing took almost 170 years. There was time for multiple generations to prepare, retrain and adjust to this shift. A farmer’s grandson could become a factory worker.........

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