BRICS bets big on AI, but leaves the job displacement question open - ET AI

TEXT START: The New Delhi Declaration prioritises AI adoption and reskilling, but offers little on workers displaced by automation.

The Dissection

This is a policy-omission article disguised as a future-of-work analysis. It catalogs BRICS’ pro-AI commitments, then exposes the missing mechanism for workers whose jobs disappear. Its useful distinction is between creating new skills and dealing with eliminated work.

But it remains trapped inside the official frame: AI is an opportunity, displacement is a transition problem, and replacement jobs will exist. It describes the gap without modeling the underlying economic break. The duplicated passages and unfinished references also make it a policy memo, not rigorous evidence.

The Core Fallacy

The article treats displacement as a temporary mismatch between old skills and new skills. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, that is the wrong mechanism.

If AI achieves durable cost and performance superiority across cognitive work, new sectors will also be optimized toward fewer humans. Reskilling does not create enough durable demand for displaced workers; it merely moves them toward a narrowing set of roles. The article assumes that engineering, data and AI jobs will expand sufficiently, remain human-dependent, and be accessible to the workers being displaced. None of those assumptions follows.

It also confuses access to AI with control of AI capital. More compute and broader adoption may improve national productivity while returns remain concentrated among the owners and controllers of models, infrastructure and energy. “Productivity, incomes and living standards” is asserted as though gains automatically reach workers.

The phrase “no worker should be left behind” is not a policy until it specifies who owns the productive systems, who receives claims on their output, and what happens when human labor is no longer economically necessary.

Hidden Assumptions

• AI will create enough new jobs to absorb the workers it eliminates.
• Human labor will remain indispensable in the emerging sectors.
• Reskilling can outrun the speed and breadth of automation.
• Skills forecasting can convert predicted demand into actual, stable employment.
• Productivity gains will flow to wages rather than to owners of AI capital.
• Gig work and remote platform work are viable substitutes for mass employment rather than lower-security displacement channels.
• Measuring job losses or identifying exposed occupations will meaningfully mitigate them.
• BRICS governments can coordinate effective protection across radically different labor markets and political systems.
• AI adoption will be gradual enough for institutions to manage sequential transitions.
• “Human-centred” and “trustworthy” AI language will constrain substitution without enforceable ownership or distribution rules.

Social Function

Classification: partial truth, transition management, prestige signaling and ideological anesthetic.

The article correctly identifies that BRICS discusses AI adoption and worker preparation while avoiding explicit treatment of job destruction. But it converts a structural crisis into an administrative omission: better forecasting, more skills, more protection and better coordination.

That framing lets institutions acknowledge displacement without confronting the fatal issue—mass employment may cease to be the mechanism through which most people obtain purchasing power. The article is not pure propaganda because it exposes the omission. Its limitation is more revealing: it stops at the threshold of ownership, distribution and productive exclusion.

The Verdict

BRICS is building the machinery for AI adoption and attaching a human-capital appendix to it. It is accelerating the force that breaks the wage-consumption circuit while offering no replacement for mass productive participation.

“Future-ready labor markets” is ceremonial language for a smaller class of AI owners and indispensable specialists, surrounded by a larger population pushed into transfers, precarious platform work or irrelevance. The article sees the missing layer but does not follow the logic to its endpoint: reskilling cannot preserve mass wage labor when AI can perform the work more cheaply and effectively. Without ownership claims on AI capital or a substitute for employment-based purchasing power, the BRICS declaration is growth policy with a bandage over a severed economic circuit.