AI won’t kill Indian mother-in-law, but will bleed it with 1000 cuts
Rumors of Indian mother-in-law dying have been greatly exaggerated. But this does not mean that pain is not present.
In the 1970s, when personal computers had not yet arrived but were on the horizon, futurist Roy Amara coined his famous law. This one-line quip became a real commentary on how humans view technological progress. “We tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short term and underestimate the impact in the long term,” he said. Every time there’s something new on the horizon, the pinch – later known as Amara’s law – comes into play. This, once again, is in play as the world grapples with AI.
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In conversation after conversation on the AI, we see Amara’s ghost smiling at her. People promoting AI at the moment are doing so because they are underestimating its short-term impact. People, who seem to be wise sages and believe that all things human will continue to triumph over machines and algorithms, are underestimating AI in the long term.
Amara’s Law has implications for one of the burning questions of our times – will AI take over human jobs and will it lead to the death of Indian mother-in-law? Because of the publicity, the immediate consensus seems to be that yes, the Indian saas is dead as a dodo. The signs are all there. Shares of Indian IT giants have been falling for several months. Their revenues have been largely stable over the years. The number of people working in these companies is largely stable, or declining. This is all when AI hasn’t really arrived yet. It’s still on the horizon.
As tools like Anthropic Cloud and OpenAI Codex have begun to do heavy lifting in some sectors, particularly software development and finance, a sense of doom and gloom is spreading. But is this just a feeling or a reality?
The poor condition of the Indian SaaS sector, made up of giants like TCS and Infosys, is currently more a feeling than a reality. This sentiment has been further increased by the statements of Big Tech leaders. Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleiman says white-collar workers have just 18 months left before they will be made redundant. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei at the India AI Impact Summit said humans have another 24-36 months left before they are no longer the most intelligent creatures on the planet. AI like ChatGPT, Cloud and Gemini will surpass the human brain by then. Every day we hear apocalyptic predictions about the state of jobs in the SaaS industry. It seems as if the world is about to end.
In some ways, the old world really is ending. But as with global changes, they rarely happen suddenly. The wheel of time moves slowly. The death of the Indian mother-in-law will also not be sudden. Instead, it will be a process where either Indian tech giants will have to transform themselves into something they are not currently, or they will perish.
And in the process, they will bleed as the AI cuts them in 1000 ways. What effect this bleeding will ultimately have on them, we are not sure yet. Later it may even kill them. Or it could make them stronger, because as the popular saying goes, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Whatever the case, the process will be painful.
As AI tools get even better, and some of them are already terrifyingly good, they will be adopted into all kinds of workflows across industries. They will not completely take over human jobs. But gradually AI is bound to transform work in industries in a way where fewer humans are required and where intelligence does not have as high a cost as it currently does.
This is sure to have a big impact on SaaS companies. Their revenues will be squeezed, their ability to set prices for their products will be challenged. Their power of negotiation will reduce. They will be forced to cut expenses. They will struggle to survive in the present, instead of dreaming of flourishing in the future. The number of people and the number of hours needed to do something will decrease and then decrease more. This will impact the number of hours billed by SaaS companies.
Jobs in India’s IT industry will definitely be affected, although high-rise buildings in Bengaluru will not be vacant due to AI. There is another cliché going around these days. AI will not replace you, but someone, or rather many, using AI will replace you.
This is a bit of a misnomer and an attempt to calm fears of mass layoffs by Big Tech. It’s like telling horses, as a famous cartoonist on the Internet shows, that “cars will not replace you, horse-drawn cars will.” History has proved its absurdity. In fact, horses were replaced by cars, but not by horses that could drive cars. In other words, as the world changes the skills required in the new world are different. And not everyone will have the means and capabilities to adapt.
The reality is that a large portion of the workforce in the Indian IT industry will be replaced by AI. Even Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cannot answer whether these employees get any other role or not. He recently said, “I cannot guarantee that more jobs will be created than destroyed.”
However, the next few years are going to be painful for the Indian mother-in-law. Unless there is some regulatory and policy support. But that’s a topic for another day. Indian IT giants will face an existential crisis in the coming years. Rumors of his death are certainly exaggerated, but expect copious bleeding in many unexpected ways.
