Brain Economy refers to the economy that is primarily dependent on skill instead of body and manual labour to operate. With the oncoming onslaught of technology, brain economy will become the future. To stay globally relevant, become a world leader, grow the size of economy and attract more investment, India needs to take brain economy more seriously.
Technology is our friend, and with the unprecedented pace of changes in technology (Generative Artificial intelligence and resulting changes in job market) is threatening the job market. However, to fight the job shift due to technology, one needs to understand the technology.
- Technology will not replace humans but will change the profile of the jobs needed. The Invention of airplanes created additional jobs of pilots and air hostessess.
- To survive the changes in technology led job market, we need to be more understanding of important issues like privacy, inclusivity, fairness and ethics. These are the components that are not currently on offer by Artificial intelligence.
- As a human, controlling the AI that will perform menial and repetitive tasks, humans need to understand and commit to qualities such as agency, commitment, empathy and perseverance. These will become the valuable traits in brain economy.
Steps needed by India to embrace the brain economy:
- As a hub for software products, which might be replaced by code generating ChatGPT-3 etc., India needs to upskill the youth to data analysis and data scientists.
- Training an AI model is cost expensive and requires expertise. This can be the next expertise that can be mastered by the software sector of India, by leveraging the present capabilities.
- The use of AI is likely to generate even more amount of data. Big data engineering along with data storage with privacy, inclusiveness, fairness and ethics is needed in future.
Therefore, India needs to embrace the brain economy and embrace the changes with open arms, skill the youth appropriately, and bring policy level changes to ease the adoption of technology. Combined with the demographic dividend, these steps will catapult India to the status of global leader in economy.
