Shifting global demographics: An African opportunity? (4)
Africa still has time to benefit from the age of labour (1) Century after century, technological progress has failed to produce massive job losses or the feared “technological unemployment”. Robots can and do take over routine tasks ( and increasingly some non- routine ones), with job losses owing to factor substitution. But evidence of job losses due to 4IR is scarce. Author Daniel Susskind argues in his 2020 book A World without work: Technology, automation and how we should respond that while machines take over some jobs, they add value to the jobs they do not take over.
The total value from the complementarities of the “productivity effect”, “bigger-pie effect” and “changing-pie effect” generates more demand and thus new jobs (Susskind, 2020). That is, they create as many or more jobs as they displace. There is wide agreement on this thesis. This motivates Susskind (2020) to assert that the current “Age of Labour” will continue for decades.
Human labour has repeatedly proven its utility in the face of many innovations over the past centuries, and humans are intrinsically more adaptable than machines. Thus, people should continue to add value regardless of how proficient machines become. And as the past two industrial revolutions each lasted for at least forty years, one could reasonably assume that the fourth will probably last as long. Also, as the digital technologies of the fourth industrial revolution would transform production and its inputs in unprecedented ways, the cycle may take longer to fully evolve. In other words, its impacts may emerge more slowly than the hype suggests.
In his 2020 book How innovation works: And why it flourishes in freedom, author Matt Ridley highlights famed futurist Roy Amara’s portrayal of how we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run but underestimate it in the long run. Artificial intelligence’s underwhelming evolution to date almost certainly reflects the Amara hype cycle ( Ridley, 2020). He makes the point succinctly: “I am not saying autonomous cars won’t happen, just that we are likely to be underestimating the time it will take and the disappointments along the way ( Ridley, 2020).”
So, Africa probably still has time to leverage its demography for growth over the next thirty years or so. And this cycle could very well last longer than that. That said, with the skill level and labour intensity of the past industrial revolutions inversely proportional to each other, there is little doubt that production-related sectors will need less labour in the future.
Regardless, thirty years is more than enough for Africa to earn its demographic dividend. It took China just thirty- five years to transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial powerhouse, for instance. Africa could very well have as much as eighty years to do likewise and equip its population for the inevitable future of high technology.
This is because “even at the century’s end, tasks are likely to remain that are either hard to automate, unprofitable to automate, or possible and profitable to automate but which we will still prefer people to do ( Susskind, 2020).” Also, Africa does not need to take as long as China.
Human labour has repeatedly proven its utility in the face of many innovations over the past centuries, and humans are intrinsically more adaptable than machines. Thus, people should continue to add value regardless of how proficient machines become
Edited & published by the NTU- SBF Centre for African Studies at Nanyang Business School, Singapore. References, figures, tables, etc. in original article viz. https:// nbs. ntu. edu. sg/ Research/ ResearchCentres/ CAS/ Publications/ Documents/ NTU- SBF% 20 CAS%20ACI%20VOL.%20202032.pdf
“Dr Raji