Technology the paper tiger

The threat of artificial intelligence (AI) wiping out swathes of occupations is becoming a grim reality when you note the pace of layoffs and the slowdown in hiring by Big Tech, banking, insurance, high-end manufacturing, and even the travel and hotel industries.

- KANIKA DATTA.

The warp-speed pace of change has caught the world unawares. But technological change has been eliminating jobs since the postwar global manufacturing boom, well before AI made its job-threatening entrance on the world stage. The difference was that the pace of change was relatively slow. It was information technology (IT) that changed the velocity of the transformation.

The industry in which this newspaper functions is a case in point. For at least a century, newspaper pages around the world were produced on hot metal presses, demanding a unique level of subeditorial skills in reading metal slugs backwards. In the West, this technology was gradually phased out between the 1960s and the 1980s (the New York Times made the transition only in 1978). India entered this phase in the early to mid-eighties, replacing hot metal with “cold press” or phototypesetting. The clatter and romance of the old iron monsters operated by singlet-clad “composers” were replaced by the air-conditioned setting of green-screened computers and the anodyne buzz of dot matrix printers churning out “proofs”.