While we are still faced with the current anxiety of mass youth unemployment in South Africa, we should not turn a blind eye on the potential of employment shrinkage that technological developments are set to bring. Much like wood, fire and paraffin stoves were replaced with electricity, solar and gas. Human labor might – could – be replaced by “robots”.
The question for us south Africans should be who is going to produce, maintain and program them? The real threat this technological unemployment is bringing along is not just the mere replacement of humans with machinery, but the quick and constant development of this machinery. In the car manufacturing industry, a lot of employees have lost their jobs to machinery and that does not mean Doctors and other specialist are safe because the rate at which this robotics industry is developing, might leave everyone unemployed but for the man who makes them.
Although the development of machinery has helped economies grow, we have to be careful that we are ready to co-exist (still employed/employable) by the time “robots” take over which is in the coming few years. In the past, machinery needed human assistance but that pattern is changing. Thus showing that humans need machinery, making the human skill obsolete and invaluable.
The safe bet is to run faster than technology. However, remembering that whatever man can do, robots can be trained to do – better and more efficiently. If you are working in a chemical laboratory, you have by now come across the fully automated GC-instrument that requires you to just prepare the samples, feed them into the tray and come back for results. I can assure you that some engineer somewhere is working on an instrument to prepare samples. By that I mean someone is finding a solution to cutting the expenses companies acquire in the form of having you as an employee.
For now we should just be comforted by human interaction that has always been in demand, such as the many occupations that require an emotionally intelligent human being. From psychologist, physiologist, nurses and teachers who are safe – for now.
Our duty is to find many spaces that humans can fill and simply teach our kids technology because if we won’t make the robots, someone else will.
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