Let’s play a role fixing SA
AI: MANY PROFESSIONS WILL BE REDUNDANT
As South Africans, we all have a duty, because our beautiful country is on a precipice. Yes, we have had recent leadership changes, but that change isn’t enough.
It provides a platform for possibility, but it does not provide the possibility itself. What we need to avoid the precipice are jobs, lots of them. And yet unemployment in South Africa sits at staggering heights, by some estimates close to 40% most of whom are young and black and have never had a job. This alone is a mammoth problem, but it gets worse if you consider our country in a global context.
South Africa’s economy was built in great part on natural resources and manufacturing. Our resources are now drying up (in some cases quite literally, Cape Town) and I have now seen that artificial intelligence and robots are going to eliminate not only manufacturing jobs, but this will extend deep into middle and professional roles most of whom are blithely unaware of this impending reality.
There is a common misconception that the impact of AI will be isolated to robots taking over the lower-paying jobs. While many of the jobs from that sector will go quickly, the impact extends way beyond. Think about the noble professions of doctors, accountants and lawyers, the “safe jobs” for clever people. Which lawyer will you use? The one with the great memory, or the one which can instantly draw from from the history of every case ever brought to court. How about the very experienced doctor versus an artificial intelligence which can pattern match your tumour against a million others. In one second.
What makes this industrial revolution fundamentally different is that we are replacing our minds and not our hands, and the impact of that is way more profound than the human race has ever experienced.
I choose to see “opportunity” over the customary “doom and gloom” response. This shift can drive positive change, but this change is contingent on having some honest, difficult and brutal conversations with ourselves as a nation and take the actions to meet this new world head-on. Technologies like AI and 3D printing combined, in time, with almost infinite energy provided by near zero cost solar, will offer the opportunity to raise the floor on a more acceptably quality of life for all human beings. The technology-driven abundance will ensure that even the poorest of the poor have access to the services they need.
Firstly we need to start putting a Universal Basic Income into our medium-term financial plans because it is without question going to become a necessity. However, the most important thing South Africa can do is recognise what skills will be valuable and obsessively train our people for them. Creating farm jobs is not future-focused, there are already robots that can do many farm jobs more efficiently and way cheaper than humans.
The only way for humans to combat the rise of AI is to develop and enhance the skills that are unique to humans, and therefore difficult for machines to replicate. Machines excel at iterative learning, but are very poor at genuine innovation.
The most important business skills will be creative thinking and leadership.
There is a heuristic which suggests that when unemployment reaches at 41%, there are enough people with nothing to lose that the rule of law no longer has meaning and chaos and anarchy are likely to break out. With our government talking about a focus on agriculture and factories to help create jobs, they are doing little to help the coming problem. What makes matters worse is that most of our education system is readying our people not for a digital future, but for an analogue past. That past is now behind us and if we keep using the tactics that worked in those days, we will never succeed in building a great nation.
Rob Stokes is the chairperson of Red and Yellow School.