Robots Don’t Take Toilet Breaks

robot
One of the points I often make is about one million Indians entering the workforce every month. That makes it 12 million or 1.2 crore youth entering the workforce every year.

That is our ‘so called’ demographic dividend.

And that is half the population of Australia.

And that is more than 2.5 times the population of New Zealand.

The question is where are the jobs for these youth?

The former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan made a similar point recently, when he said: “Remember that we have what we call the population dividend. A million new people entering the labour force every month… If we don’t provide these jobs that are required, you have a million dissatisfied entrants. And that could create a lot of social mischief.”

The government’s response to this issue seems to be, that we have done what we could, now it is the industry’s turn to do its bit. As Arvind Panagariya recently said“The major impediment in job creation is that our entrepreneurs simply do not invest in labour intensive activities.” Pangariya said this on August 25, 2017. He was the vice-chairman of the Niti Aayog at that point of time. His term came to an end on August 31, 2017.

Recently, the Labour Secretary M Sathiyavathy also made a similar point, which was that eight states had amended the Industrial Disputes Act. This gave firms more flexibility to hire and fire workers. But despite this the corporates were not investing in labour intensive industries in these states.

The question is why are firms not investing in labour intensive industries. First and foremost, the Industrial Disputes Act is not the only labour law going around which needs to be amended, if corporates are to invest in more labour-intensive industries.

As Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya (the same Arvind Panagariya quoted earlier, and this makes me wonder why did he say what he did) write in India’s Tryst with Destiny: “The costs due to labour legislations rise progressively in discrete steps at seven, ten, twenty, fifty and 100 workers. As the firm size rises from six regular workers towards 100, at no point between the two thresholds is the saving in manufacturing costs sufficiently large to pay for the extra costs of satisfying these laws.” Hence, India needs better labour laws. The work that has already been done on this front is clearly not enough.

We will get back to labour laws later in the Letter. Recently, I came across a very interesting research report by Nikhil Gupta and Madhurima Chowdhury of Motillal Oswal, who have a very interesting data driven take on why Indian corporates prefer to use capital rather than labour.

The analysts use data up to 2014-2015 from the Annual Survey of Industries and based on it conclude that over a period of 35 years up to 2014-2015, the rate of employment in the Indian industry has increased at 1.9 per cent per year on an average. At the same time, the gross value added has increased at the rate of 8 per cent per year on an average.

One method of measuring the gross domestic product (GDP) is by calculating the value added by the different industries during the period the GDP is being measured. This value added is referred to as gross value added (GVA). The GDP is defined as GVA plus indirect taxes minus subsidies.

What the Motilal Oswal analysts are essentially saying is that while the gross value added has grown at a rate of 8 per cent per year, labour employment in the industrial sector has grown at just 1.9 per cent. Factories covered by the Annual Survey of Industry covered around 1.4 crore individuals in 2014-2015. This basically reflects labour employment in the formal sector and forms around 20 per cent of the total employment in the Indian manufacturing sector.

So, what is happening here? Why has GVA grown at 8 per cent per year and the employment at just 1.9 per cent per year? The companies have expanded using capital (i.e. money to buy machinery and equipment). Gupta and Chowdhury point out that employment has grown at an average of 1.9 per cent per year, over a period of 35 years. In comparison, the capital employed by industry has grown at the rate of 14 per cent per year.

Clearly, capital has won the race hands down. Or if I were to put it in simple words, when it comes to Indian industry, machine has won over man for a while now.

The total number of employees per factory has come down from 80 in the early 1980s to around 60 in 2014-2015. Hence, the average Indian factory now employs one fourth fewer people than it did earlier. At the same time, the total capital employed in a factory has jumped from less than Rs 50 lakh to more than Rs 10 crore, during the same period.

There are multiple things that we can conclude from these numbers:

  • The Indian corporates prefer machine to men and they have done that for a while now.
  • The Indian corporates like the idea of expanding their production and in the process their business, by installing new machines and equipment, rather than employing more people. (Okay, I know I am saying the same thing in different ways. But it is important to make this point multiple times).
  • It also tells us that Indian corporates like corporates in any other part of the world, do what is beneficial for them. They are in the business of doing business and not in the business of creating jobs.
  • The question is why do Indian corporates prefer machines over men? The reason is straightforward. Machines are cheaper and more productive than men. Over the years, the labour costs have been growing at a much faster rate than the capital cost. The ratio of cost per unit of labour divided by cost per unit of capital was greater than 2.5 in 2014-2015. This basically means that hiring additional employees to expand is much more expensive than simply installing extra machines and other equipment.

The cost of per unit of labour has gone up over the years, whereas the cost per unit of capital has remained more or less stable. What this tells us very clearly is that when companies expand, it is cheaper for them to employ more machinery and get the machines to do the job, than human beings. If I were to put it simplistically, robots (i.e. machines) have won the employment race in India.

Other than this, labour laws remain a major issue which discourage companies from employing people. Take a look at Figure 1.

Figure 1: Distribution of manufacturing workforce among small, medium and large firms in India and China. 

What does Figure 1 tell us? It tells us very clearly that close to 85 per cent of Indian manufacturing firms are small. They employ less than 50 workers. In case of China, only around 25 per cent of the manufacturing firms are small. Also, in case of China, more than 50 per cent of manufacturing firms are large i.e. they employ more than 200 workers. In the Indian case, around 10 per cent of the manufacturing firms are large. And India has very few middle-sized firms which employ anywhere between 50 to 200 workers.

Since, a bulk of manufacturing firms are small, they create fewer jobs. This is a phenomenon which plays out across labour intensive sectors which can employ a huge mass of India’s unskilled and semi- skilled labour, as well. Some of the most labour intensive sectors in India are textiles, apparels and food and beverages.

The Motilal Oswal analysts point out that while the gross value added by these sectors has grown at rapid rates, the employment in them hasn’t. Take the case of textiles, the GVA has grown at the rate of 12 per cent per year, whereas employment has grown at just 3.1 per cent per year. In case, of apparels, the GVA has grown at 11.4 per year and employment at 1.8 per cent per year. For food products, the rates are at 12.3 per cent and 2.4 per cent, respectively.

These data points are again telling us that the businesses in these different sectors are growing at fast rates but they aren’t creating jobs at the same pace. At the aggregate level, what it tells us is that while companies are expanding and so is the economy, jobs aren’t being created at the same pace. In fact, jobs are being created at a very slow pace. A major reason for this, as explained above, lies in the fact that it simply makes more sense for corporates to use machines rather than human beings when they are looking to expand.

Take a look at Figure 2. It worth remembering here that the apparel sector has the potential to create huge jobs. As the chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian along with Rashmi Verma in a June 2016 column in The Indian Express, wrote: “Every unit of investment in clothing generates 12 times as many jobs as that in autos and nearly 30 times that in steel.”

Figure 2: Distribution of Enterprise Size in Apparel Sector. 

What does Figure 2 tell us? It tells us that a bulk of Indian apparel firms employ less than eight employees. This basically tells us that they start small and continue to remain small. The question is why? Labour laws the way they are, are a major reason, as I explained at the beginning of the Letter. It’s time to get into a little more detail on the issue.

As the Niti Aayog – IDFC Enterprise Ease of Doing Business – An Enterprise Survey of Indian States report points out: “Stringent labour laws have continued to hold back the emergence of large enterprises… It is however noted that a majority of enterprises tend to have less than 49 employees regardless of whether they are located in a high- or low-growth state. This may be of interest with regards to the impact of In¬dia’s labour laws on the enterprise sizes in India. Only few laws are applicable to enterprises of all sizes such as the Minimum Wages Act of 1948. As far as legal registration of manufacturing firms is concerned, the employment threshold of ten is a major mark¬ing point in the sense that all those employing ten or more workers and using electric power (20 or more if power is not used) are required to register under the Factories Act of 1948.”

If jobs are to be created the size of these firms need to go up. They need to employ more people. But these firms need to draw a comparison between labour cost and capital cost, and for a while the capital cost has been winning hands down. In this scenario, it seems highly unlikely they will create jobs.

To conclude, robots (i.e. machines bought with capital(money)) are more productive than human beings.

They are cheaper than human beings.

And also, they don’t take toilet breaks. Yes, Robots don’t take toilet breaks.

The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on October 3, 2017.

Who Will Survive the Coming Jobs Crisis?

jobs
In last week’s column I wrote about robots, automation, technology and algorithms, taking over human jobs. One reader wrote in asking by when is this likely to happen. I wish I knew. There are no straightforward answers here.

Many new organisations formed over the last few years, barely have any people working for them. Nevertheless, they are worth a bomb. Social media is an excellent example. As Edward Luce writes in The End of Western Liberalism: “In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. It had sixty-five employees, so the price amounted to $25 million per employee. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, which had thirteen employees, for $1 billion. That came to $77 million per employee. In 2014, it bought WhatsApp, with fifty-five employees, for $19 billion, at a staggering $345 million per employee.”

Of course, these companies did not destroy jobs. They did not create them in the first place. But there is a lot of technology being created out there which is helping companies in not recruiting as many people as they did in the past and firing the existing employees as well. As Luce writes: “Facebook’s data servers are now managed by Cyborg, a software programme. It requires one human technician for every twenty thousand computers.”
The point being that jobs which require people to sit in front of computers and manipulate data to manage a system or to present them in an understandable form, are going to go, sooner rather than later. For example, as is well known robots can now driver cars.

The other big question is when will companies start firing employees because they no longer need them, with robots, automation or algorithms, taking over human jobs. This is a tricky question.

As Paul De Grauwe writes in The Limits of the Market: “There are psychological sources of resistance: people who work with old technologies will not always switch to new ones because the change means part of their knowledge has become worthless.”

Over and above this there are economic sources of resistance. As De Grauwe puts it: “Old machines and tools have to be disposed of early, factories have to be closed own and employees sacked. This leads to serious opposition and delays to the introduction of new technologies.”

In the Indian case, it is very difficult for companies to sack employees en masse. It is more than likely for the local politicians and the media will get involved, and the company will end-up getting a lot of bad press. Given this, it is highly unlikely that the information technology companies which have thousands of people working for them, will end up firing employees en masse.

What they will do instead is that they will not hire the number of people that they have been doing in the past. In fact, this phenomenon has already been at play over the last few years, with the salaries at the entry level in information technology companies, remaining more or less flat. Chances are you can make more money owning and driving an Uber or an Ola taxi, than being a new trainee engineer at an information technology company.

It is also visible in a huge number of engineering seats in colleges not being filled up across several states.

When companies follow this strategy of not recruiting, it is a tad easier for them in comparison to firing people whose skillsets they don’t need anymore. That simply gives them a lot of bad press.

It is not just those working in information technology companies whose jobs will be under threat. As Luce writes: “Some types of medical surgeon and architect will be as vulnerable to remote intelligence as plant engineers or call-centre operators.”

And who is likely to survive this onslaught? As Luce puts it: “Ironically, some of the lowest-paid jobs – in barbershops and nail salons – will be among the safest. No matter how dexterous your virtual service provider, it is hard to imagine how she could cut your hair.”

Now that is something worth thinking about.

The column originally appeared in Bangalore Mirror on July 12, 2017.

The Rise of the Robots

robot

Euphemisms and corporates go together.

Vishal Sikka, the bossman at Infosys, in a recent letter to the stakeholders said: “Automation itself released about 11,000 FTE [Fulltime Employee] worth of effort through the year, a clear demonstration of how software is going to play a crucial role in our business model.”

Sikka did not specify what he meant by the phrase “released about 11,000 FTE [Fulltime Employee] worth of effort through the year”. Nevertheless, the broader point is that automation or the rise of the robots, will destroy many human jobs in the years to come.

This is not the first time that the rise of the robots or automation or mechanisation has been seen as a threat to human jobs. Similar concerns were also raised at the start of the industrial revolution in the Western world, a couple of centuries back.

The industrial revolution destroyed jobs, but it created many more new jobs, which finally led to economic growth and economic progress, the world had never seen before. What has changed this time around? If at all, it has.

Human beings essentially have two kinds of abilities: a) physical ability b) cognitive abilities i.e., the ability to think, understand, reason, analyse, remember, etc. As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus—A Brief History of Tomorrow: As long as machines competed with us merely in physical abilities, you could always find cognitive tasks that humans do better. So machines took over purely manual jobs, while humans focussed on jobs requiring at least some cognitive skills. Yet what will happen once algorithms [another name for robots] outperform us in remembering, analysing and recognising patterns?

The trouble is that the rise of the robots hits at the heart of the model that has created economic growth world over, for the last two centuries. Companies employed individuals, and paid them a salary. The individuals then spent this salary to meet their needs. One man’s spending was someone else’s income. This benefitted other individuals and companies and so the cycle worked.

Henry Ford, the automobile pioneer understood this and paid his workers very well. As Edward Luce writes in The Retreat of Western Liberalism: “Henry Ford… raised the wage he paid to factory employees to $5 a day, a sum that in the 1920s would afford a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.”

By the time the 1950s came around, Ford started to invest in automation and at this point of time a very interesting incident took place. The auto union leader Walter Reuther was being given a tour of a new factory which had robots. And he was asked: “How will you get union dues from them?”

To which, Reuther replied: “How will you get them to buy your cars?” The point being that only when businessmen paid their employees did they go out and spend that money. This spending benefitted the businessmen they worked for, as well as other businessmen. Many employees of Ford, went out and bought Ford cars because they were well paid.

Once companies start employing more and mor robots instead of human beings, this model of economic growth and progress will go for a complete toss. As Luce writes: “The new economy requires consumers with spending power – just as the old one did. Yet much, like the farmer who eats his seed corn, Big Data is gobbling up its source of future revenue.”

The rise of the robots or Big Data or increased automation and mechanisation, will take away human jobs. As Luce writes: “Whether you listen to utopians or dystopians, all agree the share of jobs at risk of elimination is rising. McKinsey says almost half of existing jobs are vulnerable to robots.”

If robots take over, then humans don’t earn. If they don’t earn, how will they spend money. And if they don’t have money to spend, the question is, how will the companies run by robots, make money.

This is a question that nobody seems to have an answer for.

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on July 5, 2017.

Why Bill Gates is Right About Robots Paying Taxes

Bill_Gates_June_2015

In the recent past, there have been a spate of predictions about robots taking over human jobs.  One such prediction was made on October 3, 2016, by the World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, when he said in a speech: “Research based on World Bank data has predicted that the proportion of jobs threatened by automation in India is 69 percent, 77 percent in China and as high as 85 percent in Ethiopia.”[i]

As per predictions being made, it is not only jobs in the developing countries that are at risk. As Rutger Bergman writes in Utopia for Realists: “Scholars at Oxford University estimate that no less than 47 per cent of all American jobs and 54 per cent of those in Europe are at the high risk of being usurped by machines. And not in a hundred years or so, but in next twenty years.” He then quotes a New York university professor as saying: “The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame.”[ii]

I have view which is different from robots destroying human jobs and I wrote about it in late January 2017. The fear of robots or automation destroying human jobs is not a new one and has been around for a while. So, what is it that makes this fear so believable this time around?

As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus—A Brief History of Tomorrow: “This is not an entirely new question. Ever since the Industrial Revolution erupted, people feared that mechanisation [which is what robots are after all about] might cause mass unemployment. This never happened, because as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future.”[iii]

The question is: What has changed this time around?

Human beings essentially have two kinds of abilities: a) physical ability b) cognitive abilities i.e., the ability to think, understand, reason, analyse, remember, etc. As Harari writes: “As long as machines competed with us merely in physical abilities, you could always find cognitive tasks that humans do better. So machines took over purely manual jobs, while humans focussed on jobs requiring at least some cognitive skills. Yet what will happen once algorithms outperform us in remembering, analysing and recognising patterns?

And given this, robots will takeover human jobs is the conclusion being drawn. This conclusion has one basic problem—it assumes that human beings will sit around doing nothing and let robots take over their jobs. Now that is a very simplistic thing to believe in. Hence, if and when, it seems likely that robots are really look like taking over human jobs, it is stupid to assume that the governments will sit around doing nothing. There will be huge pressure on them to react and make it difficult for companies to replace human beings with robots.

Over and above this, governments will lose out on tax. When an individual works, he earns an income and then pays an income tax on it to the government. Income tax is a direct tax. Over and above this, in India, when he spends this money, he pays other kind of other taxes, which are largely indirect taxes, like excise duty, service tax, etc. A similar structure works all over the world.

Now let’s say this individual paying taxes gets replaced by a robot. So, the government does not get the income tax that it was getting in the past. Over and above this, the individual who has lost his job, will not spend as much as he was in the past. He will go slow on spending in order to ensure that his savings last for a longer period of time, or at least until he finds another job. If a substantial number of individuals lose their jobs to robots, in this scenario, the government will lose out on a portion of indirect taxes that it was earning earlier. It will also lose out on direct taxes.

So, what is the way out of this?

In a recent interview to Quartz.com, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, said: “Certainly there will be taxes that relate to automation. Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.

Basically, taxing the robot means, taxing the company which owns that robot. And how will this help? It will help the government to finance other jobs. As Gates put it: “And what the world wants is to take this opportunity to make all the goods and services we have today, and free up labor, let us do a better job of reaching out to the elderly, having smaller class sizes, helping kids with special needs. You know, all of those are things where human empathy and understanding are still very, very unique. And we still deal with an immense shortage of people to help out there… So if you can take the labor that used to do the thing automation replaces, and financially and training-wise and fulfillment-wise have that person go off and do these other things, then you’re net ahead.”

What Gates has explained is perhaps a solution to the problem that too much automation or too many robots are going to create. There is a basic law in economics which goes against the entire idea of robots destroying human jobs. It’s called the Say’s Law. One of my favourite books in economics is John Kenneth Galbraith’s A History of Economics—The Past as the Present. In A History of Economics, Galbraith writes about the Say’s Law.

This law was put forward by Jean-Baptise Say, a French businessman, who lived between 1767 and 1832. As Galbraith writes: “Say’s law held that out of the production of goods came an effective aggregate of demand sufficient to purchase the total supply of goods. Put in somewhat more modern terms, from the price of every product sold comes a return in wages, interest, profit or rent sufficient to buy that product. Somebody, somewhere, gets it all. And once it is gotten, there is spending up to the value of what is produced.”

Say’s Law essentially states that the production of goods ensures that the workers and suppliers of these goods are paid enough for them to be able to buy all the other goods that are being produced. A pithier version of this law is, “Supply creates its own demand.”

What does this mean in the context of robots destroying human jobs? If robots destroy too many human jobs, many people won’t have a regular income. If these people do not have a regular income, how are they going to buy all the products that robots are going to produce? And if they are not going to buy the products that robots are producing, how are these companies driven by robots going to survive?

Gates has offered a solution where he says that the government taxes the companies using robots, more. That money can then be used to retrain people and deploy them in areas where people are still needed.

This means that such people will be paid by the government. And when they are paid by the government they will pay income tax as well. Over and above this, these workers will also spend that money and pay several indirect taxes to the government. Hence, the government will use the money generated from taxing robots to generate more taxes for itself.

Gates suggestion is also in line with what I had said earlier about the fact that once automation becomes a real danger to human jobs, the governments will not just sit and wait it out, but will do something about it, given that there will be tremendous pressure on them from people who elected them. It will also work towards protecting its tax revenues. Hence, any government taxing the output of robots, will be in line with this.

Gates suggestion depends on several assumptions. First and foremost is that people who lose their jobs to robots will be trained for other professions. While, this sounds simple enough, it clearly isn’t. Second, it expects the governments to do the right thing. That as we all know, is easier said than done. Third, it assumes that companies will willingly pay tax on their robots and not look at loopholes to avoid making these payments.

Having said that, Gates’ suggestion still shows one way of getting through the economic mess that the robots are likely to create.

To conclude, if my job doesn’t get replaced by a robot as well, I hopefully will be around to keep writing about this trend in the months and the years to come.

Watch this space!

[i] Speech by World Bank President Jim Yong Kim: The World Bank Group’s Mission: To End Extreme Poverty, October 3, 2016

[ii] R.Bergman, Utopia for Realists—The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders and a 15-Hour Workweek, The Correspondent, 2016

[iii] Y.N.Harari, Homo Deus—A Brief History of Tomorrow, Harper, 2016

The column originally appeared in Equitymaster on February 23, 2017

Why Robots Are Not Going to Screw Humans-At Least Not Yet

Sony_Qrio_Robotot

If you are the kind who reads the inside pages of newspapers carefully, you would know that these days stories around robots replacing human jobs are quite common. Most of these stories are written in a way that suggest that doomsday is upon us.

But is it as straightforward as the newspapers and the media makes it out to be? I really don’t agree. I had first written about this issue a few months back in the weekly Letter that I write, but given the importance of the issue, I am sharing my thoughts with the Diary readers as well.

In the recent past, there have been a spate of headlines in the media on the capabilities of robots having reached a stage wherein they can take on human jobs. Here are a few news items, along these lines, which I have come across over the last few months.

1) In May 2016, the shoemaker Adidas announced that it would start manufacturing shoes in its home country of Germany after nearly two decades. But it shall use robots and not human beings to do the same. The company calls its robot factory the speed factory. A second such factory is being planned in the United States as well.[i]

2) In another similar case, Foxconn, a company which manufactures mobile phones for both Samsung and Apple, is replacing 60,000 workers with robots.[ii]

3) In July 2016, HfS Research, a research firm based in the United States, predicted that by 2021, India’s information technology companies will lose around 6.4 lakh jobs to automation. This is something that high ranking officials of Indian IT firms have also said.

4) In mid-September 2016, the textile major Raymond said that it was planning to slash 10,000 jobs across its manufacturing centres all across India and replace them with robots and technology. The company currently employs 30,000 employees.[iii] Hence, robots are likely to replace one-third of its workforce.

5) Driverless cars have already arrived. As Ruchir Sharma writes in The Rise and Fall of Nations—Ten Rules of Change in the Post-Crisis World: “The most common job for American men is driving, and one forecast has driverless smart cars and trucks replacing them all by 2020.”[iv]

6) And if all this wasn’t enough, on October 3, 2016, the World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said in a speech: “Research based on World Bank data has predicted that the proportion of jobs threatened by automation in India is 69 percent, 77 percent in China and as high as 85 percent in Ethiopia.”[v]

These are just a few examples of the expectation that robots will take over human jobs that I have come across over the last few months. As can be seen, this threat looms not just over India but over large parts of the developed as well as the developing world.

As Rutger Bergman writes in Utopia for Realists: “Scholars at Oxford University estimate that no less than 47 per cent of all American jobs and 54 per cent of those in Europe are at the high risk of being usurped by machines. And not in a hundred years or so, but in next twenty years.” He then quotes a New York university professor as saying: “The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame.”[vi]

Indeed, the threat of robots taking over human jobs is nothing new. So what makes the threat this time around so different from the previous ones? As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus—A Brief History of Tomorrow: “This is not an entirely new question. Ever since the Industrial Revolution erupted, people feared that mechanisation [which is what robots are after all about] might cause mass unemployment. This never happened, because as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future.”[vii]

The question is: What has changed this time around?

Human beings essentially have two kinds of abilities: a) physical ability b) cognitive abilities i.e., the ability to think, understand, reason, analyse, remember, etc. As Harari writes: “As long as machines competed with us merely in physical abilities, you could always find cognitive tasks that humans do better. So machines took over purely manual jobs, while humans focussed on jobs requiring at least some cognitive skills. Yet what will happen once algorithms outperform us in remembering, analysing and recognising patterns?

Hence, the robots used until now essentially replaced the physical things that human beings did in factories. The trouble is that now the robots have also started thinking (in the form of algorithms) and hence, many more human jobs are on the line. Harari feels that “as algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, created unprecedented social inequality.”

This argument along with the evidence offered before seems to be pretty convincing, if seen in isolation. But there is a lot more to this than just the evidence that is currently being offered. As Sharma writes: “While the robotics revolution could come faster than most previous technology revolutions, it is likely to be gradual enough to complement rather than destroy human workforce. A huge gap still exists between the size of the world’s industrial robot population—about 1.6 million—and the global industrial labour force of about 320 million humans. Most of the industrial robots are currently unintelligent machines, committed to a single task like turning a bolt or painting a car door, and indeed half of them work in the car industry.[viii]

As per the International Federation of Robots, South Korea currently has the highest penetration of robots. The country has 437 robots per 10,000 employees. Japan and Germany come in second and third with 323 robots and 282 robots per 10,000 employees, respectively. China has 14 robots per 10,000 employees.[ix]

The point is that there aren’t as many robots going around as there are made out to be. Also, it is worth remembering here that large parts of the Western world and Japan are currently seeing their population decline. China will also soon reach that stage as well. Hence, in that sense the robots will arrive at the right time replacing the decline in the labour force. As Daniel Kahneman the Noble Prize winning psychologist (he won the Economics prize) told John Markoff, a journalist, who covers science and technology for The New York Times: “You just don’t get it…In China, the robots are going to come just in time.[x]

The point is that when it comes to big predictions like robots taking over human jobs, there are always a few ifs and buts. The trouble is that these ifs and buts are not being highlighted as much as the core argument of robots taking over human jobs, currently is.

Other than these factors there is a basic law in economics which goes against the entire idea of robots totally destroying human jobs. It’s called the Say’s Law. One of my favourite books in economics is John Kenneth Galbraith’s A History of Economics—The Past as the Present (In fact, anyone who wants to understand economics should mandatorily make Galbraith a part of his readings). In A History of Economics, Galbraith writes about the Say’s Law.

This law was put forward by Jean-Baptise Say, a French businessman, who lived between 1767 and 1832. As Galbraith writes: “Say’s law held that out of the production of goods came an effective aggregate of demand sufficient to purchase the total supply of goods. Put in somewhat more modern terms, from the price of every product sold comes a return in wages, interest, profit or rent sufficient to buy that product. Somebody, somewhere, gets it all. And once it is gotten, there is spending up to the value of what is produced.”

Say’s Law essentially states that the production of goods ensures that the workers and suppliers of these goods are paid enough for them to be able to buy all the other goods that are being produced. A pithier version of this law is, “Supply creates its own demand.”

As Bill Bonner writes in Hormegeddon—How Too Much of a Good Thing Leads to Disaster: French businessman and economist, Jean-Baptiste Say, discovered that “products are paid for with products,” not merely with money. He meant that you needed to produce things to buy things.”

So what does this mean in the context of robots destroying human jobs? If robots destroy too many human jobs, many people won’t have a regular income. If these people do not have a regular income, how are they going to buy all the products that robots are going to produce? And if they are not going to buy the products that robots are producing, how are these companies driven by robots going to survive?

This is a basic question that none of the analysts, who are predicting doom on the basis of robots taking over human jobs, have bothered to ask. For capitalism to survive, it is essential that human beings work and earn an income, only then can they go around buying everything that is being produced.

The basic problem with the robots taking over human jobs argument is best explained through this example. As Bergman writes: “When Henry Ford’s grandson [Henry Ford II] gave labour union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory, he jokingly asked, “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?” Without missing a beat, Reuther answered, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?””[xi]

Also, another point that most analysts seem to miss is that if and when robots actually do start destroying many human jobs, it is stupid to assume that the governments will sit around doing nothing. There will be huge pressure on them to react and make it difficult for companies to replace human beings with robots.

To cut a long story short, it will be interesting to see how the robots taking over human jobs trend evolves in the years to come, but it will not be as straightforward as it is currently being made out to be.  If we are still in business, we will surely keep a lookout!

The column originally appeared in Equitymaster on January 25, 2017

[i] Agence France-Presse, Reboot: Adidas to make shoes in Germany again – but using robots, May 25, 2016

[ii] J.Wakefield, Foxconn replaces ‘60,000 factory workers with robots’, BBC.com, May 25, 2016

[iii] TNN and Agencies, Raymond to replace 10,000 jobs with robots in next 3 years, September 16, 2016

[iv] R.Sharma, The Rise and Fall of Nations—Ten Rules of Change in the Post-Crisis World, Allen Lane, 2016

[v] Speech by World Bank President Jim Yong Kim: The World Bank Group’s Mission: To End Extreme Poverty, October 3, 2016

[vi] R.Bergman, Utopia for Realists—The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders and a 15-Hour Workweek, The Correspondent, 2016

[vii] Y.N.Harari, Homo Deus—A Brief History of Tomorrow, Harper, 2016

[viii] Sharma 2016

[ix] Ibid

[x] A Conversation With John Markoff. Available at https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_markoff-the-next-wave. Accessed on October 12, 2016

[xi] Bergman 2016