Technology and Jobs : Created vs Destroyed

The fifth session of the Empower project included a group discussion on the topic — Technology and Jobs : Created vs Destroyed.

Technology has a great impact on people’s life. Current era is called the digital era. It has impacted jobs and how the industry works to a great extent. New jobs are created and old jobs have disappeared. Earlier, all the accountancy work was done manually, which took a lot of time, as well as there were possibilities of mathematical errors. But now, with the help of computers, we can efficiently do calculations and save time and labour.

Productivity has increased, but the question is, the impact of technology on jobs is creating more jobs or destroying them. Studies show that half of the earlier jobs will disappear due to technical advancement. Moreover, due to Artificial Intelligence most of the jobs will be erased as now machines are intelligent too.

Although the earlier manual jobs will be reduced, we can’t ignore the fact that the new jobs are also emerging. Thousands of tech related jobs like data analyst, technical developer, youtuber, social media content creator have emerged. We can argue that technology can be the pain for those people who are not updating and up-skilling themselves. But to the people, who are progressing in the direction of possibilities, technology is the ultimate boon. Technology is also helping us in providing the online platforms like Youtube, Edureka, Udemy, etc. where we can easily learn new skills and earn money.

In the US, by 1900, 41% people were involved in agricultural jobs, and by the year 2000 only 2% people were in the agriculture sector, yet unemployment dropped. There was an advancement and a big career change, old jobs disappeared, but the new jobs emerged.

After the introduction of ATM, more jobs were created due to cost efficiency introduced by routine processes created opportunities to invest in sales teams and others.

At the time of industrialisation a lot of labour was replaced by machines, but for handling and managing these machines labour is required. All jobs lost due to technological development are recovered by new jobs.

For example, 25–30 years ago everything was done on pen paper, like if you had some complaint then you fill the form it will take time to reach the concerned authority, but now we have websites, we can simply file a complaint. But for creating and managing these websites, employees are required.

Technology has destroyed some jobs but has created some new opportunities as well. Nowadays people are making money out of social media like Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok etc. Jobs like social media manager, digital marketing, App developer are very common nowadays, before there were no such jobs in the market.

People who are educated and updated with the current technology are not finding much difficulty in finding jobs for themselves. But for the people living in the rural areas who have lost their manual jobs, it is a matter of concern.

As jobs of the unskilled are at great risk and skilled jobs are increasing. We cannot make everyone skilled because there are so many factors governing them and being skilled up to a certain level is not enough because we are competing with computers .But with technology the efficiency of getting the work done is increasing. So, we need volunteering support from the skilled people to make others skilled.

Maybe the jobs we are doing today will be replaced by some advanced machine program, and as we are in the IT Sector, so we can be the one who are currently working on automating our own task and it sounds scary and funny at the same time, that may be we are welcoming our own unemployment. But this is the human tendency to move towards progress, we can not curb the technical advancement, thinking that one day this will cause unemployment, as we are human beings and we will keep on progressing ourselves and our skills, so that we can find a solution to every problem.

This article is based on a group discussion between Palak Bansal, Anisha, Priyanka Kura, Bhawesh Bhansali, Ranjani Balasubramanyam and myself.