AI’s impact on human employment will vary in line with what tasks are open to automation

The AI Impact Summit held last week brought many members of the global technology royalty to New Delhi. It also featured the launch of India’s first multi-billion parameter large language model, saw announcements of big investments in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and ended with an international declaration on the need for democratic diffusion of AI. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla set the cat among the pigeons by saying that AI may destroy the software services and business processing outsourcing businesses that are so important to the Indian economy.

Elsewhere, shares of major software service companies lost ground as investors sold them after the launch of Claude Cowork by Anthropic fanned fears that several industries would be disrupted. Will the machine render the worker obsolete? This question is as old as the history of industrial civilization. This particular species of dread has quite understandably re-emerged with the rise of AI, a revolutionary technology by any measure.

The debate is mostly framed in terms of jobs. The temptation to do so is understandable—a robot takes a job, a software programme eliminates a job and a large language model destroys a job. This makes intuitive sense.

However, economists such as David Autor and Daron Acemoglu have over the past decade provided a more nuanced way to think through this very important question.The two economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have tried to shift the focus of discussion away from jobs to tasks. (‘Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications For Employment and Earnings,’ by Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, 2011). Their core point is that jobs are nothing but bundles of tasks.