By Charles Onyango-Obbo
I read in
the Daily Monitor the other day, my good friend NSSF chief Richard Byarugaba
talking about the future of work/jobs.
With,
especially, Ugandan youth facing unprecedented levels of unemployment,
Byarugaba said the future will not necessarily bring jobs, because they will be
eaten by technological advances.
“We are
already complaining about high levels of unemployment in the country especially
among university graduates, but this is set to be even acute in the foreseeable
future if the current trend of technological advancement continues,” Byarugaba
said.
It will.
“There are
also people in Uganda today whose jobs will be extinct in the next 20 years.
Artificial intelligence is becoming more pronounced and all jobs that perform
the task of a repetitive nature will be replaced by automation…,” he said.
There is a
sobering book, “The Industries of the Future” by Alec Ross. Actually the
picture the book paints is scary – 10 times worse than anything Byarugaba said.
Ross was senior advisor for Innovation to Hillary Clinton when she was
Secretary of State and his book is partly based on stuff he saw travelling to
over three dozen countries. Based on what he writes about the changes, and
destruction, wrought by technology in the US, I suspect he knew Donald Trump
would exploit the pain to beat Hillary.
So, we have
20 years, and an opportunity to milk the old economy and technology – though I
think 20 years is too long.
In South
Africa, a giant tractor company has been hiring out hundreds of tractors -
without drivers. They send the things out to peoples’ farms and control them
from a giant screen at their operational headquarters.
I visited
with a security firm in Nairobi, which is basically helping many companies get
rid of guards – easily the largest private employer outside government in most
of East Africa now.
They run
sensors around your factory or home (where they can programme in the physical
profile of family members so that they are excluded from setting off the
alarm).
Suspicious
strangers will be warned by an “invisible” voice to get away, and if they
persist a rapid response team will arrive quickly. One giant industrial
establishment with sprawling grounds, was hiring a security service that
deployed hundreds of guards. When they moved to the system they cut the numbers
to under 40, security improved, and pilferage was almost wiped out!
So, what is
to be done? As former prime minister Amama Mbabazi once said, Ugandans need to
stop “breeding like rabbits”. But you can’t exhort or force people to have
fewer children. Make them rich, and problem solved. Before the party ends, some
cashing can be done. Let us give an example. Recently Kenya released some
figures showing remittances from the diaspora had risen sharply.
You couldn’t
argue with the numbers. Rather the question was what they meant. A chap who
knows a thing about these things said the numbers counted money that people
abroad send to Kenyans who help them with stuff like researching their term
papers and all that.
Say you are
a lecturer, researcher, or PhD student at a top African Studies department at
an American university and you want to find out how Ugandans survived during
the difficult economic times of our man Idi Amin.
There is
some material online, books in libraries, but the best stuff is in the Makerere
University Library in newspapers and journal articles that haven’t been
digitised. Those that are digitised are in unfriendly PDFs. You get someone in
Kampala to do it for you.
In Kenya,
there are hundreds of young people who do that kind of “dirty” digital work.
They are a mini industry, and make a little fortune for themselves. There is a
suburb in Nairobi which is populated by a myriad of new apartments virtually
all of them occupied by these digital workhorses.
Others have
got into networks to test products. In Kenya, with its reputation for long
distance running, several chaps test shoes for sports companies. The results
are tracked online.
So while
technology will kill jobs, it will also create them. A recent report surprised
many people. It said the technology firms in Silicon Valley were hiring nearly
as many social scientists and arts graduates, as they were taking on engineers
and scientists.
The reason
is artificial intelligence has created market for non-technology. The question
of whether a driverless car should, in an accident, kill a mother and her
child, or a 75-year-old man and his wife, is a disturbing issue to be settled
by moral philosophers, not computer engineers.
So the
opportunity in a technology future is to be found in asking a very old
question. A good Ugandan would sit back and ask; “where do I eat in all this?”
Those who figure it out, won’t go hungry.
http://nangalama.blogspot.com/2017/02/technology-will-kill-jobs-but-smart.html
Onyango-Obbo
is the publisher of Africa data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site
Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3
DAILY MONITOR
Technology will kill jobs, but the smart people will not go
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