Authored CAPF Paper II precis exercise on automation and employment, with an original passage and a one-third model precis
Authored practice. The passage below is original, written for this wiki, not a verbatim previous-year question. Reduce it to about one-third of its length in your own words, third person, neutral, one connected paragraph, with a title and a stated word count.
Each new wave of technology arrives with the same two prophecies, one of liberation and one of ruin. The optimists promise that machines will free people from drudgery and create work no one has yet imagined; the pessimists warn that the machines will swallow jobs faster than new ones appear, leaving millions idle. History suggests that both are partly right and wholly incomplete. Technology has indeed destroyed particular jobs, the weaver displaced by the loom, the clerk by the computer, but it has also created whole industries that the displaced could not have foreseen. The trouble is that the destruction and the creation do not fall on the same people at the same time. The worker whose skill is made obsolete cannot always retrain for the new work, and the new work may demand education he was never given. The real policy question, therefore, is not whether to welcome or resist technology, which is futile, but how to ease the transition: to retrain workers, to build the skills the new economy needs, and to cushion those whom change leaves behind.
Reduce the passage to roughly one-third (about 58 to 62 words), in your own words, in one connected paragraph, in the third person and a neutral tone, with a title and a word count at the end.
Title: Managing the Transition, Not Resisting Technology
New technology always brings hopes of liberation and fears of mass unemployment. History shows it destroys some jobs while creating new industries, but destruction and creation do not affect the same people at once, and displaced workers often cannot retrain easily. The real task is therefore not to welcome or resist technology but to ease the transition through retraining, skilling and support. (61 words)