Context:

 Technology has made a number of traditional jobs redundant. For example, ATMs
replaced some bank jobs. The new wave of technologies like automation and artificial
intelligence is a threat to many jobs. There is an impact of technology on employment
opportunities in almost every sector.

The positive impact of Technology on jobs:-

 Technological innovations result in the improved lifestyles, and

hence consumerism increases and thereby results in more employment opportunities.
For example, the industrial revolution created more jobs than it eliminated. If we take
the example of 3D printing technology, building houses by 3D printing is a great
technological innovation. Eventually, it will result in some job losses in the construction
industry at least in the starting. But this innovation will result in creating more
affordable homes and hence more and more people may want to buy a house. And
so, with more consumers, more houses will be built and hence will create so many
jobs but of a different kind.
 Technology increases productivity and hence reduces the burden on workers and
eliminates the burden of doing repetitive tasks. For this, workers need to learn some
skills to stay employed. It’s just that the workers should be given training for the newly
created jobs. If the government takes care of the reskilling of low-skilled workers, we
can take advantage of the impact of technology on jobs.
 Due to technology, demand for technically skilled youth is increasing and hence more
jobs available for educated youth. This can solve the problem of educated
unemployment to some extent.
 Technology helps in the growth of the economy. Companies that use technology will
save so much money by replacing human labour with technological innovations. And
thereby they expand their services. And as a result, they create more jobs. More
employees will be added to the economy, and more revenue by taxes will come to
government. So, there will be economic growth. This economic growth can be utilised
by the government to create more employment opportunities with better pay.
 Technologies have the potential to create large scale jobs in rural areas and hence
addresses the rural unemployment issue. Till now, jobs with better pay are
concentrated in urban areas.

The negative impact of Technology on jobs:-

 The immediate result of new technologies will be job losses because some jobs will
become redundant. Machines and automation are replacing low-skilled workers. If any
company do not replace human labour by technology, it is susceptible to losses due
to heavy competition from other companies which use technology. So, it is inevitable
for companies to catch up with the technologies. In this process, low-skilled workers
will be the first section to be removed from the jobs. As a consequence of that, income
inequalities are further widening.
 Not just the low-skilled, and semi-skilled jobs, even high skilled job are at threat due
to the new wave of technologies like Artificial intelligence. This can reduce the
employment opportunities available for technically skilled persons.
 At present gap in the career is worse than ever with changing and constantly
improving technologies. This may force some women to stay at home after taking
maternity leaves.
 Technical advancement is forcing people to continuously update their knowledge to
sustain in the job market. This can be too overwhelming for some to balance work
and personal life.
 Conclusion:-
 Technology changes the nature of jobs. Even though some jobs will become
redundant, technological advancement has the potential to create many more
employment opportunities than it eliminated. Continuous learning and updating
the skills is the need of the hour.


Impact of Technology on Jobs

Technology for anything is the advancement of the current processes for the given
task. When we talk about technology in jobs we mean how automated work can be, so
that it increases the efficiency and enables cost reduction. In the name of effectiveness
and efficiency machines have overpowered human effort in many sectors, and will
continue to do so. What’s important is to know that technology upgrade has two
aspects on jobs is that how it has helped in making the job the employees easier and
the other is how it has reduced the number of jobs available or negative impact on the
jobs.
How technology has reduced jobs?
The major positive impact of technology is that has lesser chances of errors, as
compared to the human toll, and this could soon lead to most of the work of labour into
AI (artificial intelligence) based systems of organisation and mass production, most of
the manufacturing and the agriculture sector.

 Automation of not only the mundane tasks but also professional work performed
by the highly paid workers, if the work being done by software leads to precise
results saving money and time. The firm will end up needing less labour.
 Moreover, all workers will need to adapt, as their occupations evolve alongside
increasingly capable machines in order to work and earn. The pace of modern
technological change is so rapid that many workers, unable to adjust, will simply
become obsolete.
 The more and more technological aided work will lead to lessor labour, from the
manufacturing to tertiary every sector will contribute to the reduced demand for
labour. For example consider India a labour-intensive country, if we adapt to
capital intensive methods of production, the time will soon come when there are
masses on road, demanding jobs. Hence, we should think of new ways to employ
more and more labour rather than capital.

Arguments that Jobs will be increased due to technological advancements

  According to research, this automation will lead to more increase in jobs than it
will ever decrease. When Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister he proposed
to bring computer to India, he faced backlash from people that this will lead to
decrease in employment, however, exactly the opposite happened.
 It is widely suggested that workers will have greater employment opportunities
if their occupation undergoes some degree of computer automation. As long as
they can learn to use the new tools, automation will be their friend. For example
- when ATMs automated the tasks of bank tellers and when barcode scanners
automated the work of cashiers, rather than contributing to unemployment, the
number of workers in these occupations grew.
 With the advent of new technologies industry, experts see the need for skilled
workers increasing in the short run and persisting for at least another decade. The
experts call for training programs with a new curriculum and certifications to
standardize emerging job classifications.

Enabling more people to harness the benefits from technological advancements is in the
best interest of any business or country. Continuous investment in technology without
considering the impact on the existing workforce could result in a host of other
problems.
For a current shift from lack of conviction towards new technology to skilled workforce
initiatives like better retraining for workers who have lost their jobs to automation, and
increased financial protections for those seeking new careers, are the recommended
steps.
What is the correlation?

As quoted by renowned Management Guru Peter Drucker:

“Management has to recognize that there is no one technology that

pertains to any industry, on the contrary, all technologies are capable of
having an impact on any industry.”

Technology is growing by leaps and bounds. Innovation and disruption

have become everyday phenomena. Advancements in technology not only
help industries to function at a faster pace, but they also help to minimize
human effort and increase the efficiency of production. At the same time,
technology is also becoming an increasing factor for increasing
unemployment. Automation has made its presence felt in every industry
across the world. This has not only cut down on the need for human efforts
but also reduced the number of job openings in a multitude of fields. Not
only has technology brought the world closer, but also, it has increased the
distance between unskilled labour and the availability of jobs for them.

Positive effects

Technology is giving birth to a variety of avenues of new scientific

discoveries and developments. Some of these are artificial intelligence, 3D
printing, self-driven vehicles, and robotics. As a result, technology has
started creating employment for skilled professionals. Also, considering
automation in agriculture and manufacturing. This has opened
opportunities for people who can drive machines and even for companies
which work on automation technology. Along with the growth of jobs in the
automation sector, dependent industries start growing. For example, with
increasing automation in manufacturing, research and development in
supply chain and logistics grows. Hence, technology has been a boon
considering the number of jobs it continues to create. Given the fact that
these developments in technology are endless, employment opportunities
too will see an ever-increasing graph, more so in talent-rich countries such
as India and China.

Negative effects

The immediate result of technological advancements is observed as losses

in employment. This is because, with the growth in technology, more and
more manual tasks are replaced by machines. This makes more and more
jobs redundant as machines guarantee efficiency as well as are a cost-
effective alternative to human employees. This forces people to
continuously update themselves and hence leads to survival of the fittest.
This can be hard on an unskilled workforce which has no access to skill
development training or to education.

Concluding remarks

The intervention of technology in any domain has become absolutely

inevitable. The wonders of technology are such that it has not just boosted
productivity and efficiency, but also the level of safety which would have
been unachievable by humans alone. Faster communication, rapid
transactions, global reach are all by-products of growth in technology. We
can, therefore, conclude by saying that although technology in terms of
automation has reduced jobs for unskilled people, it has outgrown the
growth in employment in other areas. This can be dealt with a shift of
people from unskilled to specially-skilled employees. This change will
further enhance the growth of people, their employability, their pay scales,
basic income and purchasing power of people, leading the world to
development alone.

Scarce Skills, Not Scarce Jobs

The "real" challenge technology presents isn't that it replaces
workers, but rather displaces them.
JAMES BESSEN
APR 27, 2015

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LAUREN GIORDANO / THE ATLANTIC

At a large distribution centre located north of Boston, a robot lifts a

shelf holding merchandise and navigates it through the warehouse
to the workstation of an employee who then picks the item needed
for order and places it in a shipping box. Incoming orders are
processed by a computer that sends picking requests to sixty-nine
robots. Then, the robots deliver storage units to roughly a hundred
workers, saving the workers the task of walking through the
warehouse to find the items. In other distribution centres, this is
work that warehouse workers do.

The distribution centre, run by Quiet Logistics—a company that fills

orders for sellers of premium-branded apparel, is featured in the 60
Minutes episode “Are Robots Hurting Job Growth?” In the segment,
Steve Kroft poses the following question to Bruce Welty, the CEO of
Quiet Logistics: "If you had to replace the robots with people, how
many people would you have to hire?" Welty estimates that he
would have to hire one and a half people for every robot and that
the robots are saving him a lot of money.

Robots have long been a staple of science fiction. “Now they’re

finally here,” Kroft tells us, “but instead of serving us, we found that
they are competing for our jobs. . . . If you’ve lost your white-collar
job to downsizing, or to a worker in India or China, you’re most
likely a victim of what economists have called technological
unemployment. There is a lot of it going around, with more to
come.”
The robots perform tasks that humans previously performed. The
fear is that they are replacing human jobs, eliminating work in
distribution centres and elsewhere in the economy. It is not hard to
imagine that technology might be a major factor causing persistent
unemployment today and threatening “more to come.”

Surprisingly, the managers of distribution centres and supply

chains see things rather differently: in surveys they report that they
can’t hire enough workers, at least not enough workers who have
the necessary skills to deal with new technology. “Supply chain” is
the term for the systems used to move products from suppliers to
customers. Warehouse robots are not the first technology taking
over some of the tasks of supply chain workers, nor are they even
seen as the most important technology affecting the industry today.

Information technology has been transforming supply chains for

decades, often taking over tasks previously performed by shipping
clerks and other workers. Systems track items from source to
customer, keeping inventories at optimal levels and minimizing
shipping time and cost. RFID (radio frequency identification) tags
allow items to be tracked automatically, eliminating much clerical
work. These technologies allow today’s retail stores to offer a far
more varied selection than in the past, often at lower prices, and to
respond quickly to changes in demand. They have changed the retail
landscape, for example, powering the growth of Walmart, a pioneer
in adopting some of these technologies.

Yet although these technologies eliminated some jobs for clerks and
warehouse labourers, they also created new jobs by creating new
capabilities. However, these new jobs require specialized skills
among both the managers and technicians, who typically have
college degrees, as well as among the less educated operational
occupations. Workers who have these skills often learned on the
job, are actually in short supply.
Moreover, industry experts see the need for skilled workers
increasing in the short run and persisting for at least another
decade. Working with industry trade associations, academic experts
issued a “U.S. Roadmap for Material Handling and Logistics,”
arguing that:

Despite the potential of dramatically improved processes and

technology for material handling and logistics systems in the
coming years, much of the work in the industry will continue to be
done by a human workforce in the year 2025. Moreover, other
aspects of this [technology], such as mass personalization, will
require levels of operational flexibility that can only be handled by a
skilled and creative workforce. In other words, people will continue
to be vital to the industry in 2025.
As with weaving and other nineteenth-century technologies,
automation of some tasks increases the value of the remaining
tasks, even as new or deeper skills are needed. But workers with
those skills are not readily available, nor do robust labour markets
initially provide the right incentives for workers to acquire those
skills. The supply chain industry experts contributing to the U.S.
Roadmap report say that a key challenge is to “overcome a
perception that joining [the industry] might not result in a career
with suitable rewards.”
Prospective workers are not likely to make investments in new skills
if they don’t know where a particular job might lead them. No one
wants to invest in skills related to technologies that will flop; career
prospects for Segway repair mechanics are limited. The experts call
for training programs with a new curriculum and certifications to
standardize emerging job classifications. In their view, training
certifications are essential to standardizing skills that will enable
labour markets to provide long-term rewards: “On-the-job training
will be required of companies in any feasible long-term solution.
Nevertheless, there is a need to build a network of certifying bodies
to incorporate certifications from associations and related programs
in place today.” The experts call for these programs to generate
70,000 such certifications per year. As in the past, developing
broad-based standardized skills are critical to employing new
technology and creating well-paying jobs for large numbers of
workers.
These problems posed by technology are not unique to supply chain
workers. In their book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson
and Andrew McAfee make a strong argument that technology is
transforming work in a wide range of occupations. “There’s never
been a worse time to be a worker with only ‘ordinary’ skills and
abilities to offer, because computers, robots, and other digital
technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an
extraordinary rate,” they write. In the past, new technologies tended
to automate blue-collar jobs. Now, information technology has
begun automating even white-collar jobs, and the new technologies
will increasingly automate jobs for highly educated professionals
such as doctors and lawyers. Already computers can diagnose breast
cancer from X-rays and predict survival rates at least as well as the
average radiologist.

There is no doubt that technology is transforming work, but the

question here is exactly how. The two perspectives described—one
held by 60 Minutes and the other by industry managers—represent
two different views of how technology is affecting jobs in the current
economy. Both views recognize that technology takes over some
tasks that humans performed. But one view contends that
technology is not only taking over tasks, but it is also now
eliminating work overall—that machines are replacing workers,
leading to fewer and fewer jobs, especially for those without high
levels of education. In this view, technology-induced unemployment
keeps the median wage stagnant. A large pool of unemployed
workers competing for too few jobs drives wages down.

In the other view, technology doesn’t replace workers;

it displaces workers to jobs with somewhat different skill sets.
Sometimes these new skills are employed in the same occupation;
sometimes they are employed in new jobs in other occupations. But
in this view, technology is not causing an endemic shortage of jobs
except in very mature industries. Instead, wages are stagnant
because it is difficult for many workers to acquire the new skills and
labour markets do not fully compensate workers for those skills. In
this view, skills are scarce and labour markets are incomplete; in the
other, jobs are scarce.
The difference between replacement and displacement is important
because it affects policy. If technology is replacing workers, then
there is little that policy can do to overcome economic inequality
short of drastic redistribution. On the other hand, if the technology
is mainly displacing workers rather than replacing them, the future,
perhaps after a lengthy transition, might not be so different from
the past. But achieving that future depends critically on putting in
place the policies that will encourage broad-based development of
new skills. A close look at actual trends in the labour market
suggests a difficult transition is underway today rather than a sharp
break with history.

It might seem obvious that when smart machines take over human
tasks, jobs disappear. According to 60 Minutes, “bank tellers have
given way to ATMs, sales clerks are surrendering to e-commerce,
and switchboard operators and secretaries to voice recognition
technology.” But that is not what actually happened. ATMs did not
eliminate tellers. Instead, because banks could operate branch
offices with fewer tellers, they opened more offices and the total
number of tellers grew.

Bank Tellers vs. ATMs in the U.S. (in thousands)

DATA WRAPPER/BLS

Over the last decade, the number of retail sales clerks and
secretaries has grown. There are fewer switchboard operators, but
more receptionists.

Changes in Employment (1999-2009)

DATA WRAPPER/BLS

While technology takes over some tasks, it also increases the

demand for goods and services and hence increases demand for
workers performing the remaining tasks. Instead of just eliminating
jobs, new jobs are also created, sometimes in different occupations.
The widespread deployment of computers in office occupations over
the last three decades was accompanied by a 1.2% growth in jobs
per year, even though some specific occupations such as
switchboard operators lost jobs; healthcare jobs, which have also
deployed computers, have grown at 2.5% per year. The total number
of jobs in occupations that use computers has grown faster than the
overall labour market. Computers have definitely not been replacing
workers overall.

However, many of the new jobs require new skills. Bank tellers now
need marketing skills, not just cash handling; secretaries do less
typing, thanks to word processing, but they now also act as travel
agents. In many of the new jobs, the required skills are difficult to
learn, because technology changes rapidly. When workers cannot
easily acquire the skills that command good pay, their wages don’t
grow. This—not massive unemployment—is why technology has
contributed to stagnant wages for the last thirty years. While the
unemployment numbers are down, over a third of businesses report
difficulty hiring workers who have needed skills.

Perhaps new generations of artificial intelligence technology will

change things in the near future. But, according to computer
scientists, humans perform major tasks today that is not about to be
taken over by machines. Artificial intelligence might also quicken
the pace of change, intensifying the stress of switching to new jobs
and learning new skills. But that is all the more reason for policies
that can ameliorate the problems of displacement. A focus on the
supposedly imminent end of work is at best a distraction from this
challenge.
Impact of tech on jobs: The future still needs humans, but of a different kind

The future will belong to a new breed of talent, the ones that are multi-
dimensional and are able to navigate a constantly changing world with
ease.
ET CONTRIBUTORS|

Jul 22, 2017, 07.52 PM IST