Artificial Intelligence Strains the Workforce in China and India

The labor consequences of artificial intelligence are surfacing in the world's two most populous economies. The Japan Times reported that China's Workers' Daily, an official publication, urged government agencies to mount an active response as new threats emerge to the rights of employees, an unusually direct acknowledgment from state media that automation is unsettling the workforce.

In India, the displacement is already underway in a literal form. Al Jazeera documented workers feeding first-person footage of their own tasks into specialized AI models, on the expectation that the data will teach robots to copy human behavior and eventually perform the same jobs.

Taken together, the two accounts describe a transition that is moving faster than the institutions meant to manage it. The economic gains from automation accrue to capital and to the firms that own the models, while the costs fall first on workers, a distribution that governments in both countries are only beginning to confront.