IT boom, AI fears | The Express Tribune

TEXT START: Pakistan's technology sector is enjoying an impressive moment.

The Dissection

The article identifies a real contradiction: Pakistan’s IT exports can rise while AI erodes the entry-level labor pipeline that made outsourcing viable. But it frames the crisis as a policy challenge—better education, stronger infrastructure, movement into higher-value work—rather than as a structural break in the labor system.

It treats AI as a productivity accelerator that may rearrange jobs. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, AI is a direct attack on the wage-to-consumption circuit itself. Pakistan may export more digital output while requiring fewer Pakistani workers to produce it.

The Core Fallacy

The article assumes Pakistan can climb the value chain faster than AI climbs it. That is the central error.

“Higher-value” cognitive work is not a permanent refuge. Once AI achieves durable cost and performance superiority across cognitive labor, the ladder does not lead upward indefinitely; it is pulled out from beneath the climber. Education can improve worker quality, but it cannot guarantee economic necessity when machine capability improves faster than human differentiation.

The article also confuses national revenue with broad productive participation. A larger IT export figure can coexist with shrinking employment, concentrated ownership, and a workforce reduced to surplus labor.

Hidden Assumptions

• That new AI-enabled roles will appear at sufficient scale to absorb displaced workers.
• That education reform can outrun the pace of cognitive automation.
• That Pakistan can preserve a labor-arbitrage advantage after software becomes cheaper than labor.
• That infrastructure improvements convert workers into owners or controllers of AI capital.
• That global firms will continue outsourcing human judgment rather than buying automated capacity.
• That “digital dividends” will preserve productive participation rather than merely fund consumption.
• That inequality is a policy failure within the existing system, rather than a predictable result of ownership concentration.

These assumptions are not demonstrated. They are the article’s escape hatch from the actual mechanism.

Social Function

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

The article is useful as a warning about entry-level IT work and Pakistan’s weak foundations. Its anesthetic function begins when it presents reskilling and infrastructure as a likely bridge into a larger future of employment. That language preserves the respectable fiction that every worker can remain economically necessary if institutions simply reform quickly enough.

The likely transition is harsher: a smaller class of AI-capital owners and controllers, a thin layer of indispensable technical operators, and a much larger population whose consumption may require transfers while their labor is no longer structurally required.

The Verdict

The article sees the first fracture but misdiagnoses the disease. Pakistan’s problem is not merely that cheap labor may lose competitiveness; it is that the entire labor-export model is built on a circuit AI is designed to sever.

IT exports may continue growing after the workforce stops mattering. That is not a digital dividend. It is productive capacity becoming detached from mass employment—the post-WWII order dying behind a rising revenue statistic.