by Varun Mayya
Chapter 12
Robots Will Take Your Job
“There is no reason and no way that a human mind can keep up with an artificial intelligence machine by 2035.”
—GRAY SCOTT
Artificial intelligence (AI)
What’s a chapter about AI doing in a book about freelancing? Well, simple statistics really. A report put out in February 2016 by Citibank in partnership with the University of Oxford predicted that 47% of US jobs are at risk of automation. In the UK, 35% and in China, it’s a whopping 77%.
According to research by Business Insider, three of the world’s 10 largest employers are are now replacing their workers with robots.
Remember the Life cycle of a Skill graph from chapter three? A skill goes through the stages of early adoption, acceptance, peak popularity, commoditization and then partial or complete automation. Not only does this apply at a micro level to skills and sub skills but also at a macro level to jobs and industries.
The Adoption Bell Curve applies at a macro as well as a micro level
Most jobs ripe for automation are repetitive tasks. This means jobs that people have been doing for years like manual labour, restaurant waiters or bank tellers are at the risk of being taken over almost entirely by a computer!
More and more traditional retail stores are shutting down because they just can’t compete with their ecommerce counterparts, not because they are less popular, but because the costs of running a physical store and having employees show people around are several times more than running an e-commerce store. At the start of this century, maintaining an e-commerce store would cost you a minimum of $200,000 a year, whereas today it costs less than $30 a month for a Shopify account.
There are chat bots that are replacing aspects of customer support, are always nice to customers, are easy to fix and come at a one-time cost instead of having to be paid a monthly salary. Because anybody in the world can build a bot with tools available today. The cost of a bot is extremely cheap—every time someone builds a bot at a low price, someone outbids that person and builds an even cheaper bot in a quick bid to make more money. Humans can’t be down priced like this (we have to buy groceries and pay rent); so these kinds of roles are becoming less viable options.
Should I be scared?
This might all sound like a futuristic dystopia, but it’s real and it’s around the corner. Being on the edge of recruitment has shown us data that’s telling us that employers are avoiding hiring for repetitive roles—instead saving their money to hire senior talent. If there’s something a bot cannot do, an employer would much rather hire a freelancer or an agency for the short term and get it done instead of taking on the liability of hiring someone full time. Executives who once relied firmly on their intuition and experience are now face-to-face with machines that can learn from massive amounts of data and make informed decisions like never before. Self-driving cars are already starting to entice customers and have much cleaner track records than real drivers!
When you take jobs away from people and remove their source of income, not only do they start having difficulties making ends meet, they also have a lot of time on their hands. These people are drawn towards self-destruction. The human mind needs creativity, social contact and freedom, but the human body needs food, clothing and shelter—all of which need money. A starving, idle group of people, especially in a country like India, eventually turn violent and this is a terrible, terrible idea of a future. Even if a universal basic income comes into play, it’s still not going to change the fact that there’s going to be a lot of people with no work. Humans have a mind that invents problems—real or fictional. If you’re not solving a real problem, your mind will invent a fictional problem to keep you busy. Imagine that in large numbers!
How the Pyjama Economy helps
The Pyjama Economy removes all reliance on a stable salary. If you’re fired or replaced by a machine at your full-time job, it would take you quite some time to find a new one or to learn the skills required to find a new job. All Pyjama Categories, except data entry, cannot be completely automated in the next 10 years at the least. Aside from that fact, all Pyjama Categories are all great for creative expression! So it can’t just be used to make you some money, but also prevent boredom and idle time.
I cannot stress the importance of having creative outlets in a world that is becoming more connected but at the same time, more isolated. With automation, that isolation is going to increase and most of our interaction will happen online. Pyjama Categories will help you take your trade online and stay relevant over the next decade.
Those entering the Pyjama Economy and becoming a freelancer must find and pursue their own personal mission in life rather than strive to become a cog in the machine—playing a minor role in society to serve someone else’s purpose.
In five years, college courses and other channels of higher education will be open to the public, online. To give you an example, I’m currently doing a course in Genetics and Genomics from Stanford and hope to complete it within three months. The point being that the resources for us to prepare for the coming AI revolution are available online. Some people will resist, but entering the Pyjama Economy will allow you to embrace that change and stay ready.
When each human being can create one unique combination of experiences and skills based on their personal interests and purpose, they can build their own unique brand story. The chapter “Creating your personal brand” in this book reflects that idea. This is the only way they can differentiate between themselves and a trainable machine—the trainable machine has no heart, no passion and no creativity (machines will get pretty creative soon though).
The herd is about to get a lot bigger, so step out right now and bring the world your unique flavour of passion, creativity and skill—join the Pyjama Economy today. I’ll see you on the other side!
Freelancer to Entrepreneur
The Jobspire Story
“There’s nothing wrong with staying small. You can do big things with a small team.”
—JASON FRIED
At some point in my career, I decided I was done with freelancing. I was hitting my targets so fast that I was making enough in one week to last me months. With that complacency came laziness and I actively avoided taking up new projects. At this point, Kartik and I chose to completely stop freelancing and work on something more meaningful—a full-blown start-up. We were still in college at that point, but started working on Jobspire, a recruitment platform.
Here’s an excerpt from a story I had written on my blog—the story of how we raised funding while still in college; a story that has now been shared millions of times across the web and spent an entire day trending on Yahoo’s front page.
Part One: Manipal
A year ago—I recollect the incident that started this madness.
“We’re making quite a bit of money as students, dude,” mused Kartik.
“Yeah, let’s do something even more challenging. Let’s do something big.”
“What problem hasn’t been solved yet?” asked Kartik.
“Let’s do hiring, man. The biggest competitor in the market is living on borrowed time anyway; let’s dethrone them.”
“Sounds good.”
And that was it. We shut SIZR down the very next day and began planning what Jobspire would look like a year into the future.
I immediately drafted a north star—a vision document. Something I’d show to our own employees to inspire them to work here.
Kartik and I had been working since the first year of college. We were really good product developers, but that wasn’t enough—we needed to hire some more people. I remember there was an incredible rush because we were entering the fourth year of college. Everyone was looking for a “placement” and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was hiring en-masse. I needed to outsell the 100+ other companies appearing on campus to the people I thought I’d want to work with. I looked through my contact list and found Sandesh Kini—a qui
et person who used to sit on my bench at the back of class.
College had closed for the mid-semester holidays and he lived in Bahrain. I asked him if we could Skype.
“What’s up?” he said, in his usual nonchalant tone.
“Dude! Forget placements and come work with me. I have this start-up idea and we think we can revolutionize how work happens across the country. It’s ambitious, but it could work.”
“I’m in.”
“What? Don’t you want to ask your parents or take a while to think?”
“Nope! I'm in.”
This is the fastest I’ve seen anyone commit to something which at that point was a career-defining risk. We didn’t have the experience we have today, and Sandesh had absolutely no skills to contribute. Kartik and I used Ruby on Rails and a bunch of other technology. While Sandesh was a CS Engineer like us, he had no clue how Ruby worked—he had spent his time freelancing as a video designer.
“But I don’t know Ruby or how to do any of this.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“Sounds good,” he said and he signed off.
A year ago, most people in this situation would’ve said “I have X number of job offers, why should I choose you?” but till today I’m impressed by his decision. Sandesh has transformed into one of the best product developers I know—and we meet product developers on a daily basis.
“Okay, so who’s going to sell?” I asked.
“We’ll need someone to sell, but we’re in an engineering college,” Sandesh quipped.
I looked through my contact list and found Mohak Dhingra, another quiet kid who I’d worked with at a student organization called AIESEC. He was my neighbour and we didn’t interact much.
I walked straight to his house and said:
“Dude, come work with us. We’re going to start-up.”
“Huh? What’s a start-up? I already have a job offer from Mu Sigma dude. Sorry”.
Being the nice guy that he is, he apologized and shut the door. Being the not-so-nice guy that I am, I rang the bell again.
“Dude, think about it. It’s a risk but it’ll be fun. A few years later when someone writes a book about this, do you want to be the guy who rejected something as awesome as this?”
“I don’t want to put my career on the line. Mu Sigma is a safe bet.”
“Don’t delude yourself. There’s no such thing as safe.”
After almost two hours of attempting to convince him, he cracked.
“Okay, speak to my dad.”
After a quick Skype session with Mohak’s father, he was sold.
“This is the best time to take a risk,” said his father.
Mohak agreed, but he still wanted to keep his Mu Sigma offer on hand. I said he could, but under the condition that he doesn’t tell the rest of the team about it.
To me, it meant our team was complete. We had everything we needed to be self-sufficient and Kartik and I began working on a prototype for the product. With our old projects, we were such a good team that one person would choose to do the design and front end while the other person would do the back end. Kartik chose the back end; so I positioned myself on the design front. We needed someone to do the testing; so I spent eight hours everyday for almost a week teaching Sandesh how to write tests. Truth be told, he learnt much faster than me and put in a degree of effort I once thought was impossible.
We slogged away for three months. While Mohak was contacting every HR he could find asking them about their problems, Sandesh wrote the tests and Kartik and I wrote the code. We noticed we weren’t getting much sleep. We had to attend college from 8 AM to 5 PM and then we’d work from 7 in the evening to 4 in the morning. I didn’t even know when we slept or ate. It was pure adrenalin.
Work took a toll on us. Nobody could handle the physical and mental stress, being always on our feet and then sleeping three hours a day. Writing Jobspire code a day before my exam, I started to crack. I was starting to feel uneasy, random spells of shortness of breath and a general sense of gloom. So I went to see a doctor.
“You have a blood pressure of 160/100, your resting pulse is 100 and your serum cortisol (stress hormone) is 36 µg/dL,” said the doctor.
“How do I fix it?”
“Go to Goa.”
Stupid advice, I thought to myself. I don’t need a vacation.
I’ve never been more wrong in my life.
It’s incredibly hard to describe a panic attack. That evening, I felt strange and puked out the pieces of bread I ate. I suddenly felt very confused about where I was and what I was doing. My hands and feet were trembling and my breathing was fast. Now I’m not an idiot, and I know what hyperventilation can do to you. My hands and feet lost so much sensitivity that I wasn’t able to clench my fists. My entire left side was hurting like hell. I thought I was having a heart attack and the ceiling was blurring fast. Sandesh, Kartik and my flatmate Tejus rushed me to a hospital.
The heart monitor showed that my heart rate was 160 and rapidly increasing.
“So this is it?”
For some reason, I was least bothered about dying. I was a little disappointed that I wasn’t able to finish what I started, but I was so dazed, I just closed my eyes. The panic attack subsided in a few hours.
“What was that?” I asked the doctor.
“That’s what happens when you take things too seriously”.
I woke up the next morning, still feeling completely out of whack. I don’t think I can ever function like this. I feared what I felt at that point was permanent. We were still in Manipal, so I took the first flight for home. I stayed at home for about a week. In that time, both my thought process and my mind returned to normal. It felt good to be back.
I took the next flight back to Manipal and appeared for my exams. The team got together, this time with a new addition. It was Rushil, a new developer who we’d hired. Sandesh had taken up the responsibility to train him; he was now a full-stack developer. It was the best piece of news I’d heard in months. I’d also been reading a lot to prepare myself for the journey ahead. Sandesh was in the same class, so he started reading a lot as well. We used to get kicked out of class often for reading books about start-ups, psychology, marketing, meditation and everything else under the sun.
During this period, we went to an event in Bengaluru where we met Anshumani Ruddra, who, at that point, was the head of Tiny Mogul Games (Hike Messenger’s game studio) and one of our first mentors. It gave our team a little more exposure. I also made a bold move and hired Prajwal, a friend of mine from Bengaluru to come onboard as a co-founder. It was another easy sell.
Part Two: Delhi
The seventh semester of college was over. Everyone had found jobs and we were still building our product. “Guys, college is a big time suck. I don’t want to do the eight semester. I think we should just drop out,” I proposed.
Kartik agreed while Sandesh and Mohak looked at us with disbelief.
“You’re asking us to waste the 3.5 years of effort? You think our parents are going to be okay with that?”
“Yeah,” I said. I knew Kartik was with me because we’d gained enough experience and confidence to know that college was a waste of time. There was a dearth of developers and we were minting money. $100/hour was SIZR’s average billing rate.
“There’s got to be some other way out of this,” said Rushil.
“Varun, game the system.”
“How?” I asked
“Let’s find an incubator or a company to work under. The eight semester can either be done in college or as an internship under some other company.”
Technically, we were doing the most complicated internship ever, but we’d still need some company to take us under their wing.
My first instinct was to apply to Microsoft Accelerator. A few weeks later we got a mail saying that while we got into the top 10% of all applicants, we neither had the product nor the team to be considered.
“Screw that, let’s look for others,” I s
aid optimistically, even though we were running out of time. As the CEO of the company, it was my job to sound optimistic all the time, even if I didn’t feel optimistic at all.
We looked around and found a few good ones. Mohak came to us and told us that there was this great incubator in Delhi that one of his friends had worked with.
When we approached the incubator, we made it clear to them that this was an internship for us and freed up a lot of time instead of spending hours a day at college. While we could’ve done all of this in college, we had to spend four hours a day compulsorily in college without internet. I knew how to hack into the college internet and give me unlimited access, but we’d all be in different classes and it would be hard to coordinate.
“Delhi it is, guys.”
While Rushil and Mohak were from Delhi and super happy about the decision, Sandesh was neutral and Kartik was visibly upset.
“Why Delhi, dude? It’s going to be 5 degree Celsius and we don’t have any friends there.”
My logical reply to Kartik’s question was a short one:
“YOLO.”
Prajwal couldn’t make it to Delhi (his college wasn’t letting him leave), so I had to tell him that he couldn’t be a part of this anymore. I felt like I let him down. I could let the emotion of letting someone go (especially a long-time friend) affect me, but I had to stay focused, at least for the rest of the team.
So off we went to Delhi. We logged on to Housing.com and failed to find a house. They were either already booked or the pictures/cost were misrepresented. We ended up wasting a week, then took a small three bhk apartment at Maple Heights in Sushant Lok, Gurgaon. We were paying 25k in rent and the four of us—Rushil, Kartik, Sandesh and I—were to live together while Mohak was to live with his parents in Delhi and come to work at 8 AM everyday.