The jobs & technology trade-off

Do we need to curb technology that replaces jobs? The jury is out

One of the stated goals of India’s G20 presidency is to foreground “its belief in a human-centric approach to technology, and facilitate greater knowledge-sharing in priority areas like digital public infrastructure, financial inclusion, and tech-enabled development in sectors ranging from agriculture to education”. This is laudable, but the big elephant in the room that remains unacknowledged is the negative impact technological progress has on jobs.

India has been facing a jobs crunch since at least the end of the Vajpayee era, but the reason why we did not see it coming was the high growth period of 2003-08, which got