How refreshing it was to hear President Cyril Ramaphosa talking about technology and telecoms and its central role in the future of SA’s development.
His emphasis on the importance of the digital economy — especially the much-hyped fourth industrial revolution — and the need to revamp our education system to train our youth to embrace these “revolutionary advances in technology” is a long-needed vision.
There is no doubt the knowledge economy and technology development are a growth force the world over, as hubs in unexpected places such as Israel, India, Ireland and Lithuania have demonstrated.
Ramaphosa gave a stirring vision of the importance of these key sectors in his state of the nation address last week. “The world we now inhabit is changing at a pace and in a manner that is unprecedented in human history.”
By way of comparison, in 2015 former president Jacob Zuma dedicated all of 41 words to the telecoms and tech sectors. From that somnambulant, the country was pleasantly surprised to hear Ramaphosa’s pronouncement on the importance of new technologies.
But he warned that unless we adapt and understand these “profound” changes that are “reshaping our world” and embrace the opportunities they enable, “the promise of our nation’s birth will forever remain unfulfilled”.
As we enter our 25th year of democracy, he said, we face a choice between being left behind by technological change or harnessing it. “It is a choice between entrenching inequality or creating shared prosperity through innovation.”
AI is being seen as disrupting white-collar roles by introducing digital automation, but newer robots will also threaten blue-collar jobs even more.
Since the emergence of the personal computer (PC) in the 1980s, the internet and mobile phones in the 1990s, cloud computing in the early 2000s and super-fast mobile broadband in the last decade, the world has profoundly shifted.
Former US president Barack Obama signalled his understanding of how such technologies can enhance a country by appointing a chief technology officer for the US in 2009.
That is now a decade ago and there is a new wave of technologies that will profoundly shift the way the world operates. These are broadly being called the “fourth industrial revolution” and include the current buzzword, artificial intelligence (AI).
“To ensure that we effectively and with greater urgency harness technological change in pursuit of inclusive growth and social development, I have appointed a presidential commission on the fourth industrial revolution,” Ramaphosa announced in his address.
“Comprised of eminent persons drawn from different sectors of society, the commission will serve as a national overarching advisory mechanism on digital transformation. It will identify and recommend policies, strategies and plans that will position SA as a global competitive player within the digital revolution space.”
Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and author of the breakthrough book about human evolution, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and two subsequent bestsellers, warns that the AI revolution will be a “massive disruption … [and] a cascade of ever-bigger disruptions”.
The biggest threat from AI will be to existing jobs as digital automation replaces work that can be automated. Globally, a fifth of the global workforce — about 800-million people — may have their jobs disrupted by 2030, a study by the McKinsey Global Institute found in December 2017. It further predicted that AI will affect 800 different kinds of jobs and occupations in 46 countries.
If SA’s unions are concerned about job losses in mining and fear Eskom being privatised, they are literally worrying about the wrong industrial revolution.
AI is being seen as disrupting white-collar roles by introducing digital automation, but newer robots will also threaten blue-collar jobs even more. Amazon’s warehouses have 15,000 Kiva robots moving products around (each can carry 340kg), all wirelessly controlled. So far, 10% of Amazon’s 109 global warehouses are using these Kiva robots.
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola has aggressively invested in automated warehouses. The mining industry globally is also looking at using robots for hazardous underground operations.
“The economy is having to face ever-greater disruptions in the work force because of AI,” Harari told The New York Times. “And in the long run, no element of the job market will be 100% safe from AI and automation. People will need to continually reinvent themselves. This may take 50 years, but ultimately nothing is safe.”
Ramaphosa’s acknowledgment of this paradigm shift is therefore crucial for SA’s global competitiveness as our reliance on resources wanes.
He also highlighted the hugely significant scientific projects — the MeerKAT telescope and the Square Kilometre Array — that have already thrust SA to the forefront in areas such as space observation, advanced engineering and super-computing.
“These skills and capabilities are being used to build HERA, a radio telescope designed to detect, for the first time, the distinctive radio signal from the very first stars and galaxies that formed early in the life of the universe.”
As he said, “today, we choose to be a nation that is reaching into the future”.
If only Eskom would let us.
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff (Stuff.co.za)
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