Will AI make us all unemployable?

 

Concept and prompt by Vipin Labroo; illustration generated using OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Is AI a Frankenstein's monster which threatens to devour its creator by taking away their ability to earn a living? Is it a genie with potentially irreversible destructive tendencies that can never be reined in or stuffed back into the bottle that we released it from? Is it going to mark the end of the careers  of the educated young with degrees who view a white-collar job as their passport to success and a good life? With as many as 71 million young people not being able to find the right kind of job worldwide because of  the rapid expansion in the use of AI across businesses, organisations and industries, will we not see a worsening of an already bad situation? The gravity of this state of affairs can be gauged by the fact that according to UN DESA data, the global population will reach 9 billion by 2050, 6 billion of whom will be of working age.

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So are we looking at a ticking time bomb with regard to the future  employment prospects  for the educated young who had  hitherto been assured of decent employment? Will profit focused businesses and corporations preferring super efficient AI in place of slow, inefficient and plodding human workers lead to people of working age increasingly being rendered unemployable? What sort of a future are the young people really looking at?

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Going by how technological upheavals have been managed by people down the ages, it does seem that ultimately we will take AI in our stride and leverage it to advance humans to a much better way of living than before. But the trouble with AI is that it is well on its way to work autonomously of human oversight and even take decisions of its own volition, which may possibly make it do  what it sees as being in its own best interest and not that of the people it is supposed to serve. This is something that has not escaped the attention of experts, social scientists, industry doyens, civil society and governments around the world. There is already much talk about regulating AI and putting stringent safety measures in place.

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It is not surprising, therefore, that a minimum of 72 countries around the world have come forward with more than a thousand AI-related policy initiatives as well as legal guardrails to assuage the people's concerns and worries pertaining to AI. 

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Preventing AI from setting the employment agenda

It is important to understand and appreciate the fact that AI, no matter how sophisticated, is after all no more than a set of productivity technologies and tools meant to serve human needs and not the vested interests of anyone or anything at the cost of depriving people of their livelihood. Rather than ensuring employment for AI at the cost of the human workforce, one has to ensure that AI enhances and empowers the latter to grow and flourish.

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The economy is run as a pact between capitalists and the workforce to have a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship that serves both of their interests.. Any rupture of this compact on account of business owners edging out workers and making huge profits in the process cannot bode well for society.

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Fortunately or unfortunately for total AI take over votaries, there is a limit to how capable it is to completely perform every known function performed by real people and perform it substantially better than them. For one, the cost of large scale implementation of AI is prohibitive for most organisations and businesses. Second, one may talk about Agentic AI and all that; but there isn't enough trust in the technology and its ability to work well autonomously and with minimal supervision. So, there is this requirement of having to create a whole new class of workers to help supervise and manage these new fangled technologies.

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One cannot also rule out the possibility of the massive hype surrounding AI having created this huge bubble which could burst and end up tarnishing the image of AI as a knight in shining armour slated to transform human destiny, hopefully for the better.

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History is a great teacher and it tells us that mighty empires come and go and every once in a while a great new technology dazzles the world for some time. Our home, the planet Earth, meanwhile continues to spin on its axis and another epoch changes. The more the world changes, the more it remains the same.

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Flex fuel for India’s energy independence

 

Graphic based on an article by Vipin Labroo. Visuals generated with AI assistance.

India’s huge dependence on fossil fuel imports more often than not makes it strategically vulnerable to geo strategic headwinds. Add to that the fact that the environmental damage caused by excessive reliance on such a source of energy is visibly manifest in increasing incidence of extreme weather incidents, isn't it time that India found an alternative to fossil fuels real fast so that it can inure itself against having to depend upon an unreliable source of fuel, often used as a tool of strategic blackmail by foreign powers? That such an alternative source of energy would be easier on the environment would be the icing on the cake.

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What are the alternatives available to India in this regard? Promoting the use of electric vehicles is certainly on the cards, but one has to remember that the matching infrastructure has to come up fast. One also has to, however, bear in mind that if the power used to charge EVs does not come from a non-polluting source, we will not really be addressing the environmental issue in the best possible way

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Using flex fuel, which is a mixture of petrol and ethanol in varying proportions, is emerging as a viable and practical way of reducing one’s dependence on unreliable fossil fuel imports. What makes it very viable is the fact that ethanol is a by product of the process that converts sugarcane to sugar. It can also be made from surplus and damaged grain like rice, corn and other kinds of cereals. Given the size of the Indian agricultural sector, this is something that can be seriously looked at as a source of easily available bio fuel or flex fuel.

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Brazil, another major sugarcane producer, has long been held as the model to emulate when it comes to bio fuel or flex fuel adoption. In the aftermath of the oil shock of the 1970s, Brazil decided to start using ethanol in a major way to cut down on its reliance on fossil fuels to power its cars. In fact, cars in Brazil used to run on 100 percent ethanol right till the 2000s, when they  began to use flex fuel, and today it is common to find vehicles fueling up on flex fuel ranging from E27 (27 percent ethanol and 73 percent petrol) right through varying combinations -E30, E50 and E75 to E100. People generally opt for a combination based on the prevailing prices of petrol and ethanol.

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India achieved the E20 (20 percent ethanol and 80 percent petrol) blending target five years ahead of schedule in 2025, marking an important milestone in the nation’s flex fuel journey. Giving a further fillip to this journey towards widespread flex fuel adoption, leading Indo-Japanese car manufacturer Maruti Suzuki have announced the launch of a true blue flex fuel variant of their popular Wagon R model that is capable of running on any ethanol- petrol combination ranging from E20 all the way till E100.

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In anticipation of a growing demand for flex-fuel cars, the state-owned Indian Oil Corporation has already opened an E85 fuel dispensing petrol pump in Delhi, a first among many such pumps that are expected to open in major urban centres. What is interesting is the fact that the price of E85 has been kept 20 percent lower than the price of the E20 fuel sold at regular Indian petrol pumps.

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As more and more car manufacturers come out with flex fuel compatible vehicles and the availability of blended E85 and even E199 fuel becomes more commonplace, we may begin to see the start of a bona fide transition from relying exclusively on hard to come by fossil fuel to fuel we can practically  grow on our land. The sooner that happens, the better it is for us, as we can't wait for another global  oil crisis to hold our economy and people to ransom. The world can have its geostrategic wrangles while we look contentedly at our crops of sugarcane and breathe a sigh of relief!

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Will AI cause a water crisis?

 

Illustration: AI-generated infographic based on the author's article, "Will AI Cause a Water Crisis?"

AI has dominated conversations in recent years, causing equal amounts of hope and fear amongst its supporters and detractors, respectively, owing to its ability to massively enhance productivity, even while it threatens to make human employees redundant. What has perhaps gone unnoticed is that AI may be contributing to a water crisis in a world already reeling from an environmental crisis brought about by more than a century of rapacious, largely unhindered exploitation of the earth’s scarce natural resources. Is AI going to add another disappointing chapter to this sordid saga?

​Water Guzzling Data Centres are the Problem

It is data centres that make AI tick, but in the process consume a lot of water to cool down the servers that help in carrying out tasks ranging from summarising a document to creating an image. What that does to a country like India, where 342 million people out of a population of 1.4 billion people don’t have access to safe water, is something that needs to be seriously looked at. Water-hungry data centre infrastructure is expected to annually consume enough water to satisfy the water needs of 1.3 billion people at the end of the decade. In India, it is projected that data centres’ annual water consumption could cater to Mumbai’s water needs for a whole week. Apart from the above, the fact that the electricity generated for running a data centre also requires water adds to the problem.

​That being stated, data centres are not the only business or industrial activity that consumes a lot of water. There have been quite a few heavy industries in the past that required the use of a lot of water. The steel, textile, chemical and paper & pulp industries are cases in point in this regard. But the problem with data centres, specifically is that these are often located in areas where water resources are already very strained. The situation gets exacerbated by global warming, which can further negatively impact the availability of water.

​Can you have data centres and yet avert a water crisis?

Given that no country, including the most populous one in the world like India, can afford to lag behind with regard to AI adoption, one has to look at managing the negative fallout of such a policy with regard to pressure on scarce water resources. For instance, data centres could look at rainwater harvesting or treated wastewater for their cooling needs. They could also look at using seawater for cooling the servers, something which gives coastal cities like Visakhapatnam an advantage. No wonder that Reliance Industries  has decided to set up a 1.5 GW data centre there.

​Improved cooling technologies like air cooling and liquid cooling, as well closed loop systems, can also help reduce the consumption of water for cooling data centre servers. Besides, the use of more efficient newer chips that require less energy and cooling than in the past helps mitigate the situation as well.

​Data centre growth- planning is the key

Data centre growth may be inevitable in an era that is already defined by AI, but allowing that to happen in an unplanned, haphazard and random manner can prove disastrous for water security across nations at a time when climate change is already negatively impacting water availability across the globe. Ensuring that data centres don’t come up in regions facing water scarcity and choosing optimal infrastructure design is of the essence here. The implementation of efficient water management practices can help ensure that the growth of data centres provides an impetus to the growth of AI in countries around the world, rather than lead to debilitating water crises.

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Why do we have the most ill mannered and badly behaved drivers in the whole bloody world?

 

AI-generated illustration created with ChatGPT based on an article by Vipin Labroo.

Private vehicle ownership has exploded exponentially in India over the last thirty to forty years. While less than 1% of Indian families owned cars in the early 1990s, the percentage has gone up to 8 to 10% in recent times. This may be a miniscule percentage compared to 91.7% for American households that own at least one vehicle, affirming our being firmly in the developing nation category, but the hubris displayed on the roads across Indian cities and towns by these Johnnys come lately is appalling.

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It seems no rules apply to Indian car drivers. The bigger the car is, the fewer the rules that apply. The recent rash of incidents involving drivers of the all-mighty and all-conquering Mahindra Thar SUVs is a case in point. There is utter scorn for speed limits, with cars driven by rank nut cases tearing down the narrow roads and streets of residential areas and societies with gay abandon. People, often regardless of age and sex, drive like they have a grand prix race to win or are participating in the shooting of a car chase in a Hollywood thriller. Woe betide the poor genteel soul driving at a reasonable speed of 40 to 50 kilometres an hour if they come in the way of these speed devils.

The fiends in their mean machines will honk so loudly that you will get a heart attack. Why they might even swerve their car to a stop right ahead of yours after overtaking you, forcing you to stop as well and brace for a face-to-face confrontation with them, which might not end well for you. Discretion is the better part of valour for most average people who drive a car only to get from point A to B and are not trying to prove any point.

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Things seem to get worse with every passing year, as evidenced by the fact that people think nothing of driving against the flow of traffic, if it saves them some time, never mind the jams and chaos that they cause in doing so. This is a phenomenon that is witnessed even on the new expressways that get inaugurated with alarming regularity these days. What is behind the fact that our drivers are so obviously uncultured and even uncouth these days?

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Things weren’t so bad three to four decades back when there were far fewer people who could afford to own and drive cars. There were only the stately Ambassadors, Premier Padminis and Standards on the roads driven gently  by people who were so much better behaved and civilised than most of today’s drivers. There were long delays in the delivery of cars bought by people those days, as these needed to be booked in advance and one had to patiently  wait for one’s turn to come. Maybe their patience developed on account of waiting and waiting for the elusive car keys to land in their hands.

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Apart from government officials who were officially given cars  for their transportation needs, most car owners came from amongst high-ranking private sector employees, business people, officers in the armed forces and professionals like doctors and chartered accountants. These were the creme de la creme of society, not necessarily in terms of wealth, but certainly in terms of social mores, and it showed in the way that they drove their cars.

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As the nation slowly becomes wealthier, the number of people who can afford cars has gone up significantly, but sadly what has been lost is good manners, decency, decorum and the right set of values required when driving on a road shared with people. This is witnessed not just in the way that many people drive, but also in the way that they behave when they travel anywhere as tourists.

Talking loudly, throwing trash anywhere and everywhere like it is nobody’s business, acting entitled and picking up fights at will defines such worthies. No wonder that people are throwing up their hands in horror from Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh back home to Vietnam, Thailand and nation after nation around the world.

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People need to understand that something like driving can be a pleasure if carried out in a civilized manner. Follow the rules, don’t be aggressive and spare a thought for others driving on the road. If you are a genuine car buff, then take pride in your knowledge about different kinds of cars on the roads in terms of what brand they are, the kind of power they generate, what kind of fuel they use, their mileage and other features.

Become a member of a Beetle cars group or take part in a classic or vintage car rally. There is a whole global culture built around cars that you can choose to be proud of (check out former late night TV host Jay Leno’s private car collection online, for example and learn about cars). Blasting loud and rustic music with bawdy lyrics meant to disturb and driving like a deranged lunatic at top speed to terrify everybody on the road is not the way to be. Time to grow up.