ROBOTICS & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE : BOON OR BANE

If we look at the 10 biggest technology based inventions made ever by the Human race they should be

1. Various Laws of Nature like the Law of Gravity by Newton , The theory of Relativity by Einstein , The Law of Thermodynamics and the Laws of Motion which became the basis for most of the inventions.
2. Engines which can convert one form of energy into another ( Eg Steam Engines which were used for Locomotives )
3. Aircraft which had the ability to fly and cover distances through air and therefore in a straight line with higher speeds on Gasoline based Engines
4. Electricity both generation and transmission and various equipments running on it.
5. Computers and Programming
6. Life saving vaccines
7. Telephone / Telex / Television / Mobile : All these have the ability to transfer sound / picture from one place to another
8. Internet and World Wide Web along with High Speed data connectivity making the world flat
9. And then the Automation , Robotics which would make all repeatable jobs faster and fee from error
10. Artificial Intelligence where the robots would be intelligent enough basis algorithms to take decisions under various pre programmed logical steps or at-least ask to their human interface about the incidence and how to tackle it and once successful add it into their Intelligence.

Now let us take a pause here . If we look at the various inventions till Point No 9 we are talking of all of them as aides to human problem and they are solving the issues and making our life easy without threatening to replace us .

Item 10 & 11 combined together is something where we would make the Robots compete with Humans and would also feed them with more and more inputs by giving them more and more creative solution which they would store,

Let us take an example of a video game which is downloaded and we play with the same and after losing initially we start getting getting better at it and eventually the human mind learns all its tactics and finds ways to win over .

But just imagine if the same videogame has the ability to learn from it's mistakes and keep on upgrading it;s knowledge of playing .

There is no doubt that these Robots would be more effective as they would be free from any " human error " , can work without any raise , work round the clock without any rest and are getting intelligent too.

According to a recent study India which has seen it's economy grow to a Trillion plus economy on the back of it's services sector and which employs around 40 to 50 million people would see 20 million of them losing their jobs because of automation and AI.Now why are we going to that path ? The answer is simple to be more efficient with lesser errors , reduced costs and faster results . As a result of which we would be able to deliver better and the overall service delivery cost would decrease which can be passed on to the customers and the reaming shared between employees and shareholders .

So far so good . But let's look at the impact . Suppose there are Auto , BFSI and FMCG sector .

With the automation there are huge benefits and the costs are reduced due to lesser manpower and also better process .

So a car which could be manufactured for say USD 30,000 can now be made at USD 25000 , But with 20 million job cuts assuming that there were 2 million existing car owners and another 1 million prospective once , the Auto company would lose these new as well as upgrade customers

Similarly banks would lose their auto loan customers and also existing ones would become NPA.Insurance selling will also be much less .

The FMCG sales would also reduce at-least for items which are more fun types and luxury .

Now let us pause for a minute , we only spoke of 20 million job cuts in IT but it has a effect on other sectors which would invariably not let it's people go off as they have huge investments in assets and machineries and once sales are down the Cost of Production would go up with no real benefits passed on to the customer.

So how is it beneficial then ?

The results are

1. A huge chunk of people getting out of jobs making them and their families suffer
2. The gap between them and who have jobs would increase the inequality
3. There would be no real benefit to the consumer facing companies as their sales will go down or losses would happen due to non payment.
4. It might lead to a never ending depressed market conditions

It may be sounding a little exaggerating but we must think of it before we plunge .