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So is the leader of one of India’s biggest technology services
companies.
S. Gopalakrishnan, the chief
executive of Infosys, told me earlier on Wednesday that he worried
that over the next 20 years to 30 years, smarter computers and
increased automation could do away with many of the back-office
jobs that companies have moved to his country to take advantage of
lower labor costs and greater economies of scale.
What happened? I asked.
He said that a greater percentage of the orders were now being
submitted electronically by the customer’s customers. In other
cases previously separate computer systems were connected to each
other, so more orders were flowing electronically with no human
intervention. And finally, he said, Infosys itself had found ways
to streamline its processes so that it needed fewer people to
complete the work.
He declined to name the client for which the work was being
done.
“Some of this will happen; it’s inevitable,” he said at
Infosys’s sprawling training center in Mysore, where the company is
hosting the TEDIndia conference this week.
But citing a
recent column in
The New York Times by Richard
Dooling, the author, he added that his bigger
concern was that “as machines become smarter, they become more
powerful.”
This may not pose an immediate challenge, but he said it did
raise worrisome questions for countries like India, where a job
entering orders into a computer system pays well relative to other
semiskilled, white-collar jobs, and can help a worker support
several family members. Nasscom, the association of Indian software
and technology companies, estimates that slightly fewer than one
million people work in business-process outsourcing jobs.
“As a computer professional it doesn’t concern me,” he said.
“But as a C.E.O. and a business leader, it does concern me because
we as human beings adapt to change very slowly, and technology
seems to be accelerating in its evolution and change.”
He cited the example of people employed by media companies in
the United States as an example. As more people get news in
electronic media, employment in print media suffers. There may be
some offsetting gains in employment in new media but it likely will
not make up for all the job losses.
“We will see it every day in newspapers,” he said. “Big change
is happening.”
Thankfully for the workers here at Infosys and others who hope
to get a back office job at an Indian firm, business here is still
growing, albeit at a much slower pace than in recent years.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/should-india-worry-about-jobs/