Adoption of AI will have adverse effects on jobs, warn experts | Print Edition

TEXT START: While countries clamour to adopt AI (Artificial intelligence), a development that promises a utopian era of abundance and prosperity, experts warn of a turbulent time in human history, waiting to happen.

The Dissection

The article documents the early symptoms of labor-market failure: concentrated ownership, entry-level job erosion, attrition without replacement, and disproportionate exposure for developing countries. Its deeper function is to reduce a structural break into a manageable policy problem—reskilling, taxation, pacing, and corporate restraint. It sees the corpse beginning to cool but calls it turbulence.

The Core Fallacy

It treats AI displacement as a question of scale and timing rather than circuit failure. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, AI severs the mass employment → wage → consumption mechanism. “New jobs” and reskilling do not solve the problem unless they generate employment at comparable scale and value; the article provides no basis for believing they will.

The claim that job risk begins only when AI performs error-free work is also false. Companies need only sufficiently reliable AI that is cheaper than human labor. Attrition and fewer replacements produce the same structural outcome as mass layoffs, only more quietly. Reserving tasks for humans is a lag defense, not a permanent economic solution. Open competition will punish firms and states that preserve expensive human labor for sentimental reasons.

Hidden Assumptions

• Productivity gains will translate into enough new labor demand.
• Reskilling workers creates viable positions rather than a larger queue for fewer jobs.
• Corporate promises not to lay off staff will survive cost competition.
• Gradual attrition is materially safer than mass layoffs.
• Governments can coordinate taxation and labor protections against global competitive pressure.
• Human-only economic domains can be preserved at scale.
• Transfers or broader access to AI benefits would restore productive participation rather than merely preserve consumption.
• Sri Lanka’s shortage of young workers can coexist with mass graduate unemployment without exposing a deeper allocation failure.

Social Function

Primarily partial truth, transition management, and ideological anesthetic. The article correctly warns workers that AI will remove jobs, but keeps the proposed remedy inside the old system: train harder, regulate better, tax the gains, and trust firms to manage the transition. That permits elites to acknowledge the damage without confronting the terminal implication—that the majority may lose their role as economically necessary producers.

The Verdict

The article is directionally correct but structurally timid. It identifies the first wave: fewer openings, a collapsing entry ladder, concentrated control, and a workforce shrinking through non-replacement rather than spectacular layoffs. It still treats the crisis as “adverse effects” on jobs instead of the destruction of productive participation.

Taxation, reserved human tasks, and reskilling may manage the lag or redistribute consumption. They cannot restore the employment-wage-consumption circuit once cognitive automation, competitive adoption, and labor-demand collapse lock together. This is not merely a warning about turbulence. It is a partial autopsy of the employment system, written before the death certificate.