Old rules just have to go when technology starts a different game
Humans are losing their jobs to machines, so creativity and forethought are needed to prepare for our new roles
Stakeholders in a state — government, business, civil society — should have one goal: to grow and sustain a resilient, generative society with a high quality of life for its people. To this end, a growing economy, by extension with increasing employment, has been the normative mechanism for upward human development. This development mechanism has come to constitute our identity and meaning inasmuch as work and productivity is related to income and security.
These were the old rules. Swipe left. Our leaders — business, political, and civil society — need to become creators of new, meaningful spaces that help us reorientate ourselves in this changing world. Globalisation, markets and advanced technologies are powering the shift from post-industrialisation to postwork. We are in the age of machines and more work will increasingly be done by fewer people. The World Economic Forum dubbed this the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
It is conceivable that the time will soon arrive where our human productivity will be unhooked from labour, work and wages. As more forms of labour, capital and property become commodified and fungible, a great energy continues to be unleashed in the market that has powered global economic growth over the past 150 years. This process has accelerated with new technologies. Companies such as Uber and Airbnb have allowed more “property” to enter the market: your underused car and the latent potential of your extra bedroom. This has allowed many to reap economic benefits.
However, there is a countertrend: labour is being removed from the market. It won’t be long before driverless cars render Uber drivers obsolete. The dawn of technologies such as 3D printing, the internet of things, cloud computing, big data analytics, blockchain, robotics and artificial intelligence are accelerating the trend already set by automation: the paths of economic growth and labour absorption have diverged. The forces of globalisation dictate that SA will not be exempt. Our future may also be jobless.
INCREASED AUTOMATION
This trend set by automation has long been evident in manufacturing. Manufacturing output in the US has grown more than 200% over the past 40 years, while manufacturing jobs have decreased by more than 40%. While part of this drop is due to jobs being sent offshore — president-elect Donald Trump blames China and Mexico — most of it is a direct result of increased automation and disruptive technologies. The picture is similar in the UK, Germany, Japan and Canada.
As wages rise in China, Chinese companies are also investing heavily in a robot workforce: in 2016, Foxconn, a major supplier to both Apple and Samsung, reported it had replaced 60,000 workers with robots.
In SA, manufacturing’s contribution to the economy decreased from 20% in 1990 to 13% in 2014. Even if we can reboot our manufacturing sector and create a cohort of new industrialists, it will not create jobs at scale.
South Africans already experience a jobless environment. Most of the 800,000 matriculants of 2016 will struggle to find work, and many will give up looking. Some are not equipped even to try. With decreasing low-skilled work opportunities, even a strong-growth economy will fail to absorb most of them into the workforce.
It used to be the prevailing wisdom that as low-value jobs are shipped offshore or replaced by technology, higher-value jobs are created, ensuring that economic output and labour absorption continue to grow in tandem. This may not be true anymore.
High-value professional work is increasingly being replaced by technology. Beginning with the widely cited 2013 Frey and Osborne study, various studies show that 49% of jobs in Japan are at risk, followed by 47% in the US and 35% in the UK. These studies specifically name delivery drivers, receptionists, security guards, cashiers, accountants and other service sector jobs. Legal work is also being done by software, artificial intelligence and a combination of other technologies.
A 2015 Deloitte study predicted that 100,000 legal jobs in the UK would be automated in the next 20 years. Jobs are now being replaced faster than jobs are being created. The trend is loud and clear: if a task requires efficiency and routine, it will be done by machines, and not humans. We must orientate ourselves accordingly.
In every period of significant technological disruption, there are winners and losers. Losers play by the old rules. A South African development policy that aims to grow jobs through industrialisation and traditional manufacturing is playing by the old rules. Winners are those quickest to adapt, using imagination and innovation to bridge the gap between the present and the future.
Who the winners will be and what they would have done to win will be known only with the benefit of hindsight. However, we do know that human productivity and meaning will lie in areas of the inefficient and nonroutine: creativity, innovation, relationships, caregiving, environmental care, and civic and political engagement.
THREATS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Many countries and innovators are already embracing this shift in education, economic development strategies and social policy. Globally, teachers and parents who recognise the threats and opportunities of new technologies for their children are rushing to give their children a Stem education — a problem-based approach to learning that combines knowledge in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Recent Bloomberg analysis highlights that about 10-million students are being fast-tracked for Stem success in China. This will grow to 50-million by 2020 as Chinese parents look to give their children a head start in coding and robotics.
Many companies and cities are developing resilience strategies and are directing investment towards developing advanced urban manufacturing clusters: combining 3D printing, the internet of things, cloud computing, agile hardware design and development, DIY robotics and other technologies. More than 100 US cities are dubbed “Maker cities” as part of a White House initiative to be a nation of advanced urban manufacturers.
Various countries and local governments are experimenting with ways to ensure every citizen has a living income and then a means for personal growth, through means over and above the labour market. Conversations about a basic income grant or “social dividend” — a basic living income for all citizens as a human right — are happening in the governments of India, Canada and the Netherlands. There is a basic income grant in Alaska, and there are pilot programmes in the welfare state of Finland as well as the libertarian enclave of Silicon Valley.
There are opportunities to create new spaces of meaning, productivity and work. Andy Stern, in his book, Raising the Floor, discusses the age of machines, the postwork society, and mechanisms such as the basic income grant. He points out that raising your children or your siblings, caring for your parents, volunteering to tutor or coach, researching and developing a new business or invention and creative activity now all have the opportunity to be considered rewarded work.
In SA, we will have to find our own way through this period of certain change. While the path ahead is not clear, it must be forged nonetheless. Old ideas must transform into imaginative new ones. Together with our leaders, we need to be creators of new, meaningful spaces that help us begin to transform our present and protect our future.