By Andy Mukherjee
Amazon.com Inc.’s latest global layoffs should be a clear warning to India.For policymakers dealing with the world’s largest youth population, AI now poses a real risk to jobs, wages, and a white-collar future.
The e-commerce and cloud services giant’s elimination of 14,000 corporate positions worldwide might not directly impact its large Indian workforce much. But what’s more concerning is the type of jobs at risk: Generative artificial intelligence is starting to affect more than just entry-level computer programming.
Outsourcing hubs like Bengaluru and Hyderabad are already feeling the effects of AI. But Amazon’s cuts may affect finance, marketing, human resources, and tech employees, according to local media reports. That puts many more sectors on notice and supports a growing amount of research.
After studying nearly 200 years of data on labor markets and technological change, finance scholars at Northwestern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have concluded that advances in natural-language processing may favor occupations that require less education, pay less, and are more frequently enough held by men, such as construction and trucking.
This would be a big change from how past innovations affected the demand for workers. As Huben Liu and his coauthors explain, before the 1980s IT revolution, most automation replaced physical work while helping with thinking-based tasks. Such as, Irving Colburn’s early-20th-century machine for making window panes instead of hand-blowing glass caused the wages of glassblowers to fall 40 percent. Within a generation,machines drove an entire group of artisans out of business.
Tho, when electronic calculators arrived in the 1970s, they helped accountants and auditors become more productive. They didn’t replace them. The shift toward services like finance and health care benefited women, helping them enter the workforce as 20th-century innovations also made household chores easier.
Over time, these improvements…