Brics embraces AI but leaves job displacement largely unaddressed - The Times of India

TEXT START: NEW DELHI: Brics has set out an ambitious plan to prepare people for an AI-driven economy, but its New Delhi Declaration leaves a key question largely unanswered — what happens to workers whose jobs are lost or sharply changed because of automation and AI?

The Dissection

The article exposes a policy evasion. BRICS acknowledges AI’s productive potential, promises skills forecasting, reskilling networks, platform work, and limited social protection—but never confronts the possibility that AI eliminates more economically necessary labor than new sectors can absorb.

The declaration is preparing workers to compete for a shrinking supply of human-required tasks. It does not address ownership of AI capital, the collapse of labor bargaining power, or how displaced people retain meaningful productive participation.

The Core Fallacy

The central fallacy is treating mass displacement as a skills mismatch. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, reskilling cannot solve P1: once AI achieves durable cost and performance superiority across cognitive work, many “new skills” become temporary targets for the next automation wave.

Training may sort a minority into Servitor roles. It cannot preserve mass employment when P2 prevents institutions from maintaining stable human-only economic domains and P3 removes the majority from economically necessary labor. Social protection can preserve consumption. It cannot restore productive participation.

Hidden Assumptions

• That new digital, green, care, and remote-work sectors will expand fast enough to absorb those displaced.
• That workers can continuously outrun automation through retraining.
• That gig work and remote platforms represent durable opportunity rather than a larger pool of cheap, interchangeable labor.
• That portability of benefits compensates for the loss of bargaining power and stable employment.
• That BRICS coordination can manage competitive pressure without any restructuring of AI ownership or distribution.
• That the problem is mainly administrative rather than systemic.

Social Function

This is a partial truth wrapped in transition management and ideological anesthetic. The article correctly identifies the declaration’s silence, but the surrounding policy language keeps the reader inside the reskilling-and-protection frame. That frame makes structural displacement appear governable without confronting the terminal issue: who owns the machines that replace the workers?

The declaration itself is also prestige signaling. It borrows the vocabulary of inclusion, safety, and opportunity while leaving the distributional conflict untouched.

The Verdict

BRICS is preparing a labor-adjustment ceremony for a system whose employment circuit is being severed. Skills programs may manufacture a narrower Servitor class; social protection may ration the aftermath. Neither answers the question of what happens to the majority once AI makes their labor unnecessary.

The omission is not a minor policy gap. It is the central fact the declaration cannot safely state: under the DT framework, AI adoption without changed ownership and distribution converts workers from economic participants into dependents, surplus labor, or casualties of the transition.