Driverless vehicle is a technology that has been taunting and tantalising us for a while now. We are now told that the driverless tractor and farm equipment is ready. The machines don’t take breaks and can work all night. Isn’t that wonderful! Or is it?

The term ‘dual-use technology’ is used to refer to technologies that can serve peaceful and military purposes. We need to extend that term to also cover technologies that on the one hand can enhance a human’s safety and convenience and, on the other, replace the human.

Vanishing jobs President Obama recently bemoaned that automation has weakened the ability of workers to secure jobs. At the same time, he highlighted boosting productivity growth as a structural challenge facing America.

Much of the campaign speeches of both major candidates in the US presidential election have been raising the jobs issue. Trump wants to cancel trade agreements and turn the screws on China; he believes it has been responsible for all the job loss in the US. Even Clinton is weakly mumbling about withdrawing support for the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

Obama is disappointed with potential physicists and engineers making their careers in the financial services industry rather than ‘innovating in the real economy.’ We have seen a lot of wonderful innovation in the information technology-enabled sectors. You can count Google, Facebook, WhatsApp and other companies that would top the list and when you dig deeper you would find that they don’t employ as many people (in relation to their revenues or market valuation) as traditional manufacturing companies, and they also increasingly employ more people overseas Between 2001 and 2016, employment at computer and electronic firms in the US has fallen by about 45 per cent.

Wall Street Journal has calculated that the top five giant technology companies today employ 22 per cent less workers than their predecessors on the top five list did in the year 2000.

Helping hands The other silent revolution taking place across the manufacturing and distribution sectors is in the use of robots. Automotive companies introduced robots decades ago in their assembly lines. Now, warehouses are using robots. Slowly, companies are beginning to use robots as night watchmen (they don’t take breaks, sleep on the job or want benefits).

To remind us, Pratt Industries, a corrugated box manufacturer has released full page ads in US newspapers headlining ‘Export food, not jobs’ and that food production exceeds the auto, movie, oil and gas industries in revenues. Perhaps Pratt has not read about the driverless tractor, for the jobs are not going overseas but they are vanishing from the planet. All this can really present an opportunity to an alternative set of thinking engineers. While much of the technology developed in the industrialised world is labour saving or substituting, engineers of the developing world can specialise in labour supporting technologies for which there is a crying need in most parts of the world.

The writer is a professor at Suffolk University, Boston, and at Jindal Global Business School, Delhi NCR

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