Will We All Be Wall-Es?

WhatsApp forward. Will credit when I locate the source.

These are insanely productive companies. People? Both?

Cursor does 100 million dollars of revenue (ARR is Annual Run Rate) with 20 people, which means that the average employee generates a revenue of 5 million - roughly 45 crores per employee.

In comparison, India’s largest IT company, Tata Consultancy Company (TCS), had 240,000 crores of revenue in the last financial year, with 601,000 employees - roughly 40 lakhs annual revenue per employee. Infosys is slightly more productive, at 50 lakhs of revenue per employee.

This latest wave of software companies is a hundred times more productive than India’s global scale coding factories. I don’t know what this means for the future of Indian IT services. It can’t be business as usual, and I hope these businesses are able to adapt to greater automation of software, without losing too many jobs. I have zero expertise to comment on likely outcomes, but the stellar productivity of the ‘Small Teams’ in the graphic made me think about the future of work, and reminded me of what the futurist, Buckminster Fuller said, over fifty years ago:

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.”

Suppose this were true, I asked myself, not just of software, but also of manufacturing, and agriculture, and medical diagnosis, and hair-dressing, and cooking… as a result of which ninety, or ninety nine, percent of us become jobless? I actually don’t think this will happen, because we are an inventive species, and I think we will find new ways to be of use to each other. That is, after all, the essence of employment - something I do that is useful to others.

New jobs, in that way of thinking, will always be created.

But what if they aren’t? What if we reach a state where a small fraction of humans are so productive, in so many realms of work, that the majority of us just cannot compete, and become jobless? I see two sets of issues we will have to deal with - one societal, and the other, individual.

The first centers around distribution. If a few insanely productive human beings produce enough for all the world, will they share this abundance with others? An easy answer to this question is the knee-jerk reaction that governments will force them to do so, by the force of taxation.

(I use the word ‘force’ purposively, as it is the monopoly over force and confiscation that allows the government to collect taxes. The tax man can legally confiscate your property if you don’t pay your tax bills. If you don’t pay your grocer’s bills, he cannot do this. He needs to appeal to the government, via the courts, to collect on your behalf, once again using the government’s power to confiscate your property, or worse, your liberty).

But I hate to put the government at the center of any solution. Governments are inefficient, corrupt, and prone to capture by special interests. Governments also create meaningless jobs, what Buckminster Fuller called, “inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors”. I would much rather that people of enormous means find creative ways to pump their wealth back into society, in ways that help people find, not just material sustenance, but also creative joy.

Which brings me to the other question - what will the unemployed majority do with their lives? I saw one vision of this future in the movie Wall-E, where exiled earthlings ride through space on an unending cruise. Their chairs hover them from one spot to another, their video feeds have infinite bandwidth for entertainment and chats, they drink their meals out of straws, and they become vast blobs of fat, barely supported by dwindling bone mass.

Buckminster Fuller had a completely opposing view of what technology would enable. Via our ability to tune into anything, anywhere, he believed we would watch lectures of, “let us say, President Lowell of Harvard; the professor of Mathematics of Oxford; of the doctor of Indian antiquities of Delhi, etc. Education by choice, with its marvellous motivating psychology of desire for truth, will make life ever cleaner and happier, more rhythmical and artistic.”

We don’t have to wait for the Future, spelled with a big ‘F’, to glimpse how the unemployed will use their free time. People with jobs in legacy organisations have traditionally retired at sixty or shortly after; with increased life expectancy, they have two decades of healthy life ahead of them, or more. Many are overwhelmed by the loss of meaning and power, and slip into a sense of irrelevance, only partly alleviated by forwarding messages on WhatsApp groups.

But then there is my father-in-law, now eighty-nine, who retired as an Indian diplomat at sixty, and has spent the last three decades studying Mahatma Gandhi, writing about him, and taking his teachings to the world. Or my late uncle, my father’s younger brother, who passed last year, at ninety-nine, and till weeks before he left us, was writing academic papers and guiding Ph.D. students.

Maybe some of us are born Wall-Es, waiting for the day we can slip into a chair of infinite inertia, while others are genetically coded for a life-long journey of study and inquiry. But I think society has a huge role to play in nudging us from one end of this spectrum towards the other. People are judged by the titles they hold, and the organisations which pay them, while education is seen as the means to get them there. If self-worth is also driven by this schema of evaluation, we see learning as a means, a path to employment. In its crudest form, this manifests as cram courses and leaked examination papers. In a more sophisticated form, universities are evaluated by the average salary of their graduates.

Learning must not be limited like this. It is a life-long search for truth, evasive and multi-faceted as it is, never-ending, yet an end in itself. It is to this eternal search that we must guide ourselves and our children.