'More and more people from the middle class will become self-employed gig workers mostly working from home, rather than as office workers with salary, promotion, bonuses, etc.'
From Nvidia to Microsoft to Alphabet to Open AI to Meta to Amazon, every big to small company and major venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital to Founders Fund to Andreessen Horowitz to Tiger Global is investing big in AI now.
According to Sundar Pichai, the trillion-dollar AI investment had elements of irrationality, and if the AI bubble were to burst, every company would be affected.
Along with this is the news of all the major companies laying off employees in their thousands.
Will the investment in AI result in huge job losses and unemployment, especially in India?
"The beauty of AI is that in the context of a large company, it will substitute office workers and replace them with technology," Saurabh Mukherjea, Founder and Chief Investment Officer, Marcellus Investment Managers, tells Rediff's Shobha Warrier.
The concluding segment of a two-part interview:
Won't the job losses be felt all over the world?
It will be more in India as the West does not have as many graduates. We are a country with 8 million graduates emerging from our universities each year, and 90% of them are not getting jobs.
So, the issue of losing jobs will not be as severe in the western countries because those are ageing societies with scarce supply of labour.
So, AI will work beautifully for the west as they are short of labour, and AI will replace human beings for work.
But it is a bigger challenge for a country like India.
India's suffering, I reckon, will have a finite time span. In 3-4 years' time, India too will benefit.
India will end up becoming the global hub for cleaning data, annotating data, etc. AI chatbots all over the world will get trained in India.
So, we have to be patient because it will be short-term loss and long-term gain for India.
For a country where 65% of the population is below the age of 35, what kind of impact will this have?
The bigger disaster would have been if that population had been aged. Because the aged population struggles to adapt to new technology.
India will have to adapt relatively quickly to AI.
There will be some short-term pain on the back of the job losses we have discussed.
But in 3-4 years' time, we have very good chance of India, southern India in particular, becoming the global hub for data cleaning, data annotation and bot training.
The talk is that after white collar jobs, what is going to be affected the next will be the grey and blue collar jobs -- the gig economy. Do you feel so?
The gig economy benefits from AI as AI helps gig workers to co-ordinate among themselves and their customers.
The beauty of AI is that in the context of a large company, it will substitute office workers and replace them with technology. They will use fewer and fewer people, and replace them with AI.
If you are a smaller company, AI will help you with demand prediction, coordinating with customers, coordinating with your suppliers, etc. Small businesses will benefit from AI the world over including in India.
It is clear that there will be a churn in the employment landscape because of AI.
People will lose jobs in large firms, and they will start working for smaller firms or end up setting up their own small firm.
AI makes it far easier to do gig work than without AI.
In fact, AI will create new opportunities which we can't envisage today.
So, what will happen to the gig workers and the gig economy?
At the moment, there are 8 million gig workers in India, and 30 to 40 million office workers.
My feeling is a big chunk of India's office workers will end up becoming a part of the gig economy. The 8 million gig workers may increase to 30 to 40 million very soon.
Gig work also can be training the bot for a hospital in the UK or training the bot for a call centre in the Philippines.
So, gig work will end up being massive in our country, and a lot of white-collar work will end up as gig work.
Rather than working for one firm, people will freelance for many firms all across the world.
How is this going to affect the Indian economy and the Indian middle class as a whole?
We are already seeing the effects. There are job losses in India's tech industry, and in the retail sector.
It is also clear that AI is creating a demand for, say, bot training. If you go to Naukri.com, you will see that every week, you will see 50,000 to 60,000 vacancies for bot training, and 100,00 vacancies for data cleaners and data annotators.
This is only the beginning.
The job losses are in conjunction with the loss of white-collar office employment. And the jobs being created are in gig work related to AI.
This is the typical upheaval you expect in a free market economy on the back of technological changes; some people lose their jobs and other people gain jobs.
The impact on the middle class will be, more and more people from the middle class will become self-employed gig workers mostly working from home, rather than as office workers with salary, promotion, bonuses, etc.
Like employers treat workers on merit, the gig economy also will treat people based on merit.
Rather than working for a big employer, they will now be free agents selling their services to the world.
The difference is that the middle class will have to go from being accustomed to working inside the corporate structure to working as a self-employed entrepreneur with a global market at your disposal.
Those who are entrepreneurial will earn much more in the new world. Those who are cerebral but not entrepreneurial will learn less in the new world compared to the old world.
The free market will force all of us to adapt. The adaptation process is already on the way.
IT services will continue to be the driver of the Indian economy. The only shift that I see is, rather than large IT services companies, gig workers will be the drivers of our knowledge export.
I think, in 4 years' time, India stands to be a big winner from AI.
What will you tell young employment seekers?
They can await a life of opportunities, not employment.
Structured employment in a corporate world is on the way out.
Global opportunity for a gig worker is on the rise.
Global opportunities for Indian gig workers will be abundant over the next couple of years.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff