First Study of AI's Toll on India's IT Sector Questions Developing-World Growth Path
sebkrier · x · 2026-10-31
In Development magazine publishes what its authors Oliver Hanney and Oliver Kim describe as the first analysis of AI's effects on IT services in India.
The piece frames the question historically: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China climbed out of poverty via export manufacturing, converging on the technological frontier under competitive pressure, while countries like India took a different ladder through tradable IT services. The authors ask how much evidence exists that AI-driven displacement has actually begun in developing countries, and how to forecast what comes next when affected workers, firms and countries will themselves adapt and improvise.
They revisit the 2023 Kenyan data-labeling story — workers paid roughly $1.35 an hour to sift hate speech and violent imagery for ChatGPT — and argue that in 2026 it reads darker: those workers may have been helping automate away the very tradable service work they performed.
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