Will We Drown In Automation?

When you are sitting in India today, any discussion of robotic process automation or cognitive computing in IT/BPO invariably touches upon possible job losses. Will a whole industry of service providers and all the jobs they provide be wiped out by the forces of automation? If we look back to history, we can certainly find examples where innovation doesn’t result in extinction of the status quo, but the forces that be must still change or risk drowning in the new reality.

Let us go back to one moment in history for a parallel using the challenge of urban accumulations of horse manure in the 19^th century. In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure. The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950, every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930, the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. (Read about it here.)

Well it turns out neither city drowned in manure. Though planners and futurists sound alarming predictions extrapolating current trends, history again and again shows that extreme scenarios are never realized and humans generally develop solutions to avert those extreme scenarios. Our human history also shows that the species who survive are the ones who adapt to change.  As Charles Darwin famously said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change."

Yes, automation will lead to job losses in India and a few service providers will be eliminated as a result  but IT/BPO is also an adaptable industry that will create new jobs based on the closer integration of man and machine.

Some service providers will be able to make the transition to a more automated end-state and emerge even stronger if they embrace automation and work around the possibilities rather than worry about the threat to their labor arbitrage model. Right now, it's still too early to see this successful embrace when we dive deeper in the recent results of the major Indian-heritage service providers. (Read more here.)

The automobile came along and replaced the concerns of drowning in manure with suffocating in exhaust. Along the way horse handlers and hansom cab drivers suffered but many cab manufacturers evolved and new industries were created out of the receding heaps of dung.

Today, in the case of automation in India, It is up to service providers whether they want to become the 2020 version of hansom cab companies or automotive firms. Workers must decide whether they want to remain cabbies or want to work in factories and drive cars. We don't know how this scenario will play out, but with history as a guide, one thing we can predict is that the fear of large-scale job losses will look as trivial in the latter part of 21^st century as the fear of drowning manure looks today.