Adapting to automation

Fear of technology is hardwired in humans, though they could never keep from conducting researches on making machines that are smarter than themselves. It is like being drawn to the forbidden fruit, the fruit of the biblical tree of knowledge. So, there is the fear of a dystopian future of a society controlled by autonomous robots. But such portrayal of intelligent machines as competitors of their human masters is the popular stuff of science fiction since long.

However, the more mundane question that concerns workers in the industries is, whether automation is going to take their jobs. In Bangladesh, for instance, the fear is real for garment workers, in particular. In certain areas of the apparel industry such as in the cutting section, automation has made 48 per cent of the workforce redundant. Similarly, in the sewing section, the automation-driven job cuts affected 26.57 per cent of the workers. In a country, where, according to an estimate, the overall unemployment rate in 2024 is 5.11 per cent and the youth unemployment has witnessed a sustained rise over the past 15-plus years of the past dictatorial regime, the employed workers losing their jobs is indeed a bad news. According to the World Bank, youth unemployment rate in 2023 stood at 15.74 per cent. The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), on the other hand, informs that the unemployed graduates numbered about 8 hundred thousand in 2022. And the number of unemployed people in Bangladesh in 2024 is estimated to be 3.88 million. These are no doubt worrying statistics about general as well as youth employment situation in Bangladesh when automation has apparently appeared as a threat to employment of a large number of workers in an industrial sector whose workers are overwhelmingly women. In fact, the apparel sector has been a model before the rest of the industrial sectors as a provider of jobs to women. So, massive job cuts affecting female workers might well create an image crisis for the apparel industry at home and abroad.

True, there is no point being Luddites in a digital age. Even so, the industries going to introduce labour-and-time-saving technology at the workplace need to be more circumspect about the move seeing that it is basically a society slowly emerging from an agrarian background. In that case, the industries in question should take care that the workforce that was instrumental in bringing about their transformation may not fall by the wayside. To that end, the industries themselves as well as the government will be required to invest in developing adequate training facilities so the workers threatened with job-loss might improve on their existing skills (upskilling), while others might learn new skills (reskilling) related to the technology of automation under consideration. Since any new technology will also require workers to operate and maintain it, the notion that automation will drive out people from work is quite misplaced. On the contrary, automation has the potential to free people from drudgery. Moreover, machines replacing humans in doing repetitive tasks can be a blessing in disguise. The time that will be saved through automation can be devoted to education or other creative pursuits. Also, adapting to new technology was never a hurdle to humans- a fact amply demonstrated by the speed with which people got used to the smartphones, which are but pieces of advanced digital technology. Being user-friendly, common users, literate or otherwise, can handle it without any training whatsoever. Nowadays, even high-tech working environments are crafted in a user-friendly manner ensuring acclimatisation of workers to the new work environment easier. So, the faster our workers are able to learn and adapt to the emerging technologies, the better for their own future and the nation.

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