'It is too early to conclude that there will be a bloodbath, that there will be no jobs, and that there will be civil unrest.'
'Let's calm down.'
'AI is a tool, it is not a weapon, it is not a virus.'
AI disrupting the stock market.
AI disrupting the labour market.
AI disrupting the software sector.
AI taking away white collar jobs.
AI taking away blue collar jobs.
These is the kind of news we hear these days depicting AI as the great disruptor.
In this pandemonium of doom and gloom, Manish Sabharwal, Chairman and co-founder of the staffing and human capital firm, Teamlease Services, paints another picture.
"History teaches us that there shouldn't be too much of catastrophising and too much of predicting," Manish Sabharwal tells Rediff's Shobha Warrier.
At the AI summit in India, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgiva said AI could help India achieve the developed India goal, at the same time, it posed high risk to jobs and financial stability. So, are we seeing an AI tsunami that will disrupt or engulf the labour market as a whole?
I think it's too early to tell.
AI can impact in two ways.
It can make the highly skilled people more skilled. It can bring low skilled people to the median.
So if the low skilled people are brought to the median, it is a prominent impact. Then obviously, AI is a gift to humanity.
If the highly skilled people become uncatchable, that will have inequality implications.
The 90-10 will become 99-1 in terms of the power law of distribution.
So my sense is that there will be AI positives, so also AI negatives.
And regarding the impact on the labour market, as of now, people are indulging in palm reading or astrology.
It is obvious that it destroys some of the current jobs. But it's very hard to say which is in the sense of commission.
Then what about the sins of omission? What about the new jobs that are being created?
So I think right now, we should just calm down a little bit.
India exports more software than Saudi Arabia did oil.
Will IT employment go from 5 million to 10 million? I think it will go. But it will be doing different things.
Maybe you'll have more productivity because of AI.
India's market share in technology is only 4%-5% now.
India is a major contributor to the global outsourcing market. With AI disrupting the software industry, how will it impact India's services sector?
We have to view ourselves as a technology and digital, and we only have 4% or 5% market share of that.
So I think we should be careful with the boundaries blurring.
What AI is probably doing is blurring the boundaries between industries, between functions and between companies.
And we have only 5% of the technology services and product and digital market.
I am of the opinion that AI will actually give India an opportunity to increase our market share.
Some of the AI tools have acted as a disruptor to the software industry. Out of India's exports, 40% is services. What will happen if the services sector gets affected?
I don't believe so. It depends on the assumptions you put into it.
My assumptions are that this will actually play to India's trend.
In what way?
More people speak English in India than they do in Europe or in the rest of Asia.
And the language of technology is English.
Nowhere else in the world do we have so many people with the knowledge of English.
India produces more engineers than China and the US combined.
The India software industry is built on system integration, and AI implementation requires more execution and integration.
So it's unclear to me how you can just plug and play like SAP implementation.
SAP was supposed to destroy India's software services businesses. It didn't happen.
And companies need somebody to help them implement these technologies.
It is a travesty to say every company is a technology company. Of course, every company needs to use technology.
But how many of us know how to implement technology, execute technology?
So I think we should hold our horses right now on what I call catastrophising about Indian software.
The Indian software industry has a lot of capabilities which actually are applicable to the AI world.
It is said that up to 60% to 70% of the white collar jobs at the entry level are going to disappear. A country where 65% percent of the population is below the age of 35, which is around 880 million, how will it affect the young job seekers?
I don't know whether that's true.
You can study the 50 reports of the past 50 years which have tried to predict where jobs are.
That's why I say, they have the efficacy of palm reading on astrology.
50% of jobs created in the US in every decade in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s did not exist in the decade before that.
So you are unfortunately looking at gross calculation rather than net calculation.
Every technology creates new and different kind of jobs.
We understand that some jobs are destroyed. Like, cars destroyed horse buggies and stuff like that. But cars created so many other jobs and industries, and made mobility, logistics and transportation possible.
We need to shift from quantum physics to quantum physics, rather than to classical physics.
In classical physics, they are discrete systems while in quantum physics, everything is interconnected.
I would say, much of the catastrophising is about the gross losses rather than the gross additions.
Because it's easier to predict what you have. But it's very hard to predict what you don't have.
It is just imagination and I think it is too early to be catastrophising.
What about the blue collar jobs? Robotic automation is replacing manual labour in factories and as per the reports, by 2031, 60 million blue collar jobs will be taken over by AI.
Automation in health care, automation in education is increasingly creating jobs.
It's not clear to me how AI is as big a disruptor.
First of all, if you work with your hands and legs, AI is less of a disruption.
If you work with your mind, AI might become a productivity tool rather than an assassin.
Sundar Pichai and the Anthropic CEO warned about bloodbath in the white collar job scene...
Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. What is the barber going to say? Obviously, that you need a trim.
So I would be careful with the technology industry's predictions.
It is an arms race. In this area, they are selling arms. In a war, it doesn't matter who wins. The arms manufacturers always make money.
I think nobody has enough information in the world to use the word bloodbath.
It is too catastrophising. It is too extreme. I think he is too young to make that statement.
Michael Burry who predicted the dot-com bust says this is going to result in dot-com 2.0...
Does he mean valuations will come down? Of course, it will.
The number of people employed in e-commerce was 100 times more when the dot-com bust happened.
And employment is 100 times higher in 2026 than it was in the dot-com bust of 2000.
What do you care about, valuation or employment? These are two different parallel universes. Of course, valuations anyway needed to correct.
It is unclear to me that most of the technology companies today should be worth as much as they are, especially the eight companies in the US. Those are now 40%-50% of the US stock market.
It is unclear to me that the US should be 70% of the world stock market.
It's unclear to me that half of the US should be those eight companies.
Valuation is a different game. I don't understand that, and I'm not commenting on valuations.
But I know it is too early in the labour market terms to conclude that there will be a bloodbath, that there will be no jobs, and that there will be civil unrest.
There is too much of fireflies and froth being hyped up. Let's calm down.
AI is a tool, it is not a weapon, it is not a virus. It is not like COVID.
Let's stop treating AI like COVID. It is something we created. It is something we will harness for human ingenuity.
When you read all these predictions by the World Economic Forum or the IMF chief or Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, people fear another 'Great Depression' coming...
Just like education is too important to be left to teachers, war is too important to be left to generals, specialists also have their visions.
But they do have their blind spots too.
While they do have an interesting vision, they also have their blind spots because they have a certain cognitive thought world. And sometimes their specialisation becomes a blind spot.
History teaches us that there shouldn't be too much of catastrophising and too much of predicting.
Nobody can predict the future. The future is unknowable.
This is a time to be humble about how much we know about the future. It is a time for humility about the potential net impact of the act.
Young people looking for their first job, those who are in the job, everybody is nervous and scared of the future.
I don't think we need to be scared about the future.
I think the future will be different from the past, like it has always been.
Historians warn against a disease called presentism; the belief that today's circumstances are so special and so unique and so different from the past.
My view is, presentism is a mistake and it is also a disease.
We don't know the future but that doesn't mean it is scary
Have you started seeing the entry level jobs disappearing?
But there are other jobs being created.
I think it's too early to talk about job losses. It is premature.
As a person who is involved in jobs, what kind of job scene do you see?
The job scene is always uncertain. There is always different levels of technological change.
The level of technological changes that have happened in the last 200 years is unprecedented.
At the same time, the GDP per capita in the last 200 years is up.
Till 200 years ago, the GDP had stayed flat.
But in the last 200 years, uncertainty has increased, but the per capita income is up 200%.
So you don't believe in words like white collar bloodbath, the next Great Depression, AI tsunami etc...?
Pessimists will always get more respect than optimists because optimists sound like, we are selling you something, while pessimists sound like they are protecting you.
But it is not clear to me how pessimists have more information than optimists, or the pessimists in the past had been more accurate than the optimist.
One of the tragedies is that economics has become mathematics, and political science has become statistics.
The 'mathification' of the world is basically physics' envy.
We have to be careful with these complex adaptive systems like economies and jobs and wages because they are not spreadsheets where you take a number and pull it up or pull it down.
You can't predict the future, but you can prepare for the future.
So we should improve our education systems. We should increase our apprenticeship systems.
We can do many things which can help us prepare as an economy, make our economy more self-healing, reform our labour laws, reduce regulatory cholesterol, continue with deregulation, continue with decriminalisation, create enterprise digital public infrastructure.
So, there are a number of things we can do which will allow us to make the economy more adaptive, make our people more skilled. We should focus on that.
I don't think we need to predict the future to make our economy more flexible and self-healing.
Those who work in AI say this is another Industrial Revolution happening.
It is a new technology, and it is some sort of a revolution. But we don't know the outcome of the revolution.
When Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai in 1971 what the impact of the French Revolution was, Zhou said it was too early to tell!
That is true for AI right now. It is too early to tell.
We should be calm about AI as it is not our enemy.
There will be some job losses, but that will be more than compensated with jobs created in other areas.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff