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Location: Kerala, India

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Thursday, September 28, 2017

The advent of the Post-Intelligence era

How many men does it take to change a light bulb? One for reporting that the bulb needs to be changed, one for allocating money for the bulb, one for counting the money and handing over money, one for buying a new bulb, one for removing the old bulb, one for inserting the new bulb, one to verify that a bulb has been changed, one to supervise the bulb has been changed, one for backup just in case any of the above didn’t do their job, one to recruit all these people, one to oversee everyone worked, one to pay for all these people. Whooh!

In the past, one person could change the world. We had the Gandhis, the Mandelas, the Shivajis, the Marthanda Varmas who singlehandedly changed the history of entire nation state. But all this was before Artificial intelligence(AI). When people started seeing how useful AI really is, they started realizing that many of the job profiles don’t actually do much work. Our own Rashtrapathi Bhavan, for instance, has a job termed “Cyclist” whose profile says carrying letters from the gate of the Presidential palace to the post office(PIN 110004) inside with a monthly salary of more than 8000 and perks. A typical organization has 2-5 levels of managers whose only job is to ensure that the rest of the people do their job.


In the meanwhile, AI was evolving to become better at doing tasks one at a time. The assault of AI started with games(chess, Go, etc.), continued on to mundane office work, and has now already matured enough to replace job profiles from receptionists to software engineers! The advent of cloud computing, Internet of things and Big data, the magic trio, has transformed computing to an entirely new level. Industry 4.0 has ensured that productivity has increased manifold while bringing down the labor required. So what about the people who are losing job? Universal basic income-- the idea that every citizen is paid a fixed amount replacing all the subsidies-- is gaining traction among both socialists/left-liberals and capitalists. So how much money are we talking about. In India, the median monthly incomes of the five income quintiles are roughly 3000, 5000, 8000, 11000, 13000 respectively. The top 5 percentile makes about 18000 pm on an average. If we assume a payout of 10000pm, the outlay works out to 8 lakh crores! And that’s per month!



So how many do we need to change a bulb? With AI and robotics around, its probably NONE. But, the real question is: what kind of job would the rest of us do?

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