Mysore: In worrying about where jobs will come from in the future, Kris Gopalakrishnan, the Chief Executive of Infosys expressed his concerns that over the next 20-30 years, smarter computers and increased automation could do away with many of the back-office jobs, and the companies have moved to India to take advantage of lower labor costs and greater economies of scale

As reported by the New York Times, Gopalakrishnan recalled the example of an outsourcing deal his company took on to enter orders into an electronic system for a customer. When the contract started, Infosys had put 300 people on the job, but after a short while it was dropped to just 100 people, even though the workers were processing more orders, faster and more efficiently. He opined that separate computer systems were connected to each other, so more orders were flowing electronically with no human intervention. And finally, he said, Infosys itself had found ways to streamline its processes so that it needed fewer people to complete the work.

"Some of this will happen; it's inevitable," he said at Infosys's sprawling training center in Mysore, where the company is hosting the TEDIndia conference this week. But, his bigger concern was that "as machines become smarter, they become more powerful". This may not pose an immediate challenge, but he said that it did raise worrisome questions for countries like India, where a job entering orders into a computer system pays well relative to other semiskilled, white-collar jobs, and can help a worker support several family members. Nasscom, the association of Indian software and technology companies, estimates that slightly fewer than one million people work in business-process outsourcing jobs.

"As a computer professional it doesn't concern me," Gopalakrishnan said. "But as a CEO and a business leader, it does concern me because, we as human beings adapt to change very slowly, and technology seems to be accelerating in its evolution and change."