As the year 2022 is coming to an end, it is time for evaluation again. For a start in Malaysia, most companies have started operating full swing in the last quarter of 2021 and by 2022, they have recorded much improved profit compared to 2021 financial year. Yet, our stock market has gone in the opposite direction as compared to the pandemic year of 2020. Is this truly a good year?
The year 2022 started with improved job market for the employees. However, by mid 2022, big international companies were experiencing problems and started to retrench their contract staffs. These companies are not foreign to us and serious retrenchment was starting to gather pace in our neighbouring country Singapore. Companies like Shopee, Meta (which was facebook formerly), Twitter, Amazon and Microsoft were retrenching, with the latest to join in the bandwagon to be Google who is now considering her next layoffs. However, since these companies only have small operation in Malaysia, we were not badly affected.
And we think that we are shielded from the global retrenchment trend until the latest news of IRB having to layoff its monthly and daily workers. At this juncture, it is right to point out that not all the workers in our various government departments hold permanent positions. In fact, the contract workers form a significant proportion of government staffs. It is logical that in event of retrenchment, the contract workers would be the first casualties upon expiration of their contract as there is no requirement to pay off hefty retrenchment compensation. What leads to staffs redundancy?
So, is it a good or bad thing that our IRB is adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to improve its efficiency? In the process of adoption of AI into procedures such as tax submission and payment, complaints submission online, bot chats, less and less staffs would be required to man the counters, to attend to complaints, etc. With a more efficient and leaner IRB, less staffs are required as more jobs are being accomplished by AI. This means that the operation cost could be reduced but however at the expense of jobs loss if the other markets do not have the capacity to absorb these workers.
This leads us to think about which government departments would be the next to layoff their contract staffs. Are these departments also those who have adopted AI recently? For example, now we can actually check our assessment or bill and pay on line for DBKL assessment via their Mobis application. In fact, there are not many departments that do not process online payment. Even JPJ allows online road tax renewal and immigration department allows online application for international passports. To recap, when is the last time we walked into a government department to get things done?
In the end, it is down to the question of whether fast adoption of AI is good for the country and its citizens. We must not only take the pros of AI, while ignoring all the consequences. We need to plan in advance when moving from a labour-intensive economy to an AI cum automation dominated economy. Those who are carrying out works which can be automated should start to improvise and upgrade their job skills in order not to be made redundant by AI. Soon, trade unions may even be made irrelevant when the labour-intensive jobs are replaced by AI.
As such, we must brace ourselves and be prepared for 2023. IRB could just be the tip of the ice berg.
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