The workforce should be capable of taking on new kind of jobs, not focusing on retaining old ones, Sanjeev Sanyal has told RT India
India’s labor market and educational system should adapt to the emerging artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem, a top advisor to Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said.
Disagreeing with the idea that AI will eat away human jobs, Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, told RT India that new technologies will also create new kinds of jobs.
“Textile technology of the early 19th century caused losses of jobs. Today’s textile industry worldwide employs a lot more people than existed in the 18th century,” he said in the latest episode of the ‘India, Russia, and the World’ podcast.
Sanyal said rather than wasting time on ways to protect today’s jobs, the workforce should be retrained. Citing the example of podcasting, he asked, “Who knew that podcasting would be a profession? This profession did not exist, you know, half a generation ago.”
Stressing the need for the higher education system to become attentive to how the job market and opportunities evolve, he said, “The old system of giving lectures and curriculums is changing… at a glacial pace, all that has to go.”
He said in the future people will join the workforce at an early age. “And they may be going back and refreshing themselves well into middle age or even old age.”
The concept of concentrating all your higher education right in the beginning of your life without developing new skills the rest of your life is “probably now an outdated model,” Sanyal said. India is already a reasonably important player in AI, he noted.
“The global capability centers of Microsoft or Google or Meta or Apple, you know, are huge in India,” Sanyal said. “Even parts of the foundational [AI] models being developed by these companies are developed in India.”
He said the latest data suggests that India’s economy grew at 7.8% in the first quarter of this year, despite geopolitical shocks. India will not pursue growth by risking macroeconomic instability, he said, citing this as the “reason we have been very careful about controlling inflation.”
India has tamed inflation in the 2 to 6% target range in the last decade.
The country is creating a network of bilateral free trade pacts to counteract the breakdown of the old multilateral system, he said.
He said energy is not the only problem posed by the Iran war. “There are 10 million Indians who live in that area. We have to worry about them. They are also not only a source of remittance, but their physical safety is an issue,” Sanyal stressed.
Sanyal also talked of the hundreds of thousands of Indian sailors. “Recent conflicts have had casualties, a lot of them in West Asia, but very recently also in the Black Sea,” he said.
