| From: |
maxwell Adeoy Adew [ profile ] |
| Subject: |
THE WORLD AFTER 2020 - AUTOMATING AFRICA
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| Sent: |
Nov 19th, 2011 - 06:18:14 |
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Longtime readers of this newsletter know I worry that technology-led productivity improvements mean all the world's goods and services can now be supplied by just an ever declining fraction of the global working age population. So I was delighted to find, hot off the press - if one can describe an eBook that way - Race against the Machine by two American academics, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT. In their first chapter they summarised the explosive growth in the power of electronics and software and described some leading edge applications. In a gloomy second chapter they called up research reports which showed highly skilled labour outperforming low skilled labour; superstars earning much, much more than anyone else; and capital benefiting at the expense of labour. Median remuneration was declining while unemployment was increasing. As you would expect, their study focused almost exclusively on the American experience.
I immediately considered whether Africa would be different. After all, a new GSMA study shows that Africa, with over 620 million mobile connections as of September 2011, has overtaken Latin America to become the second largest mobile market in the world, after Asia. Over the past 10 years, the number of mobile connections in Africa has grown an average of 30% per year and is forecast to reach 735 million by the end of 2012, a penetration above 73%. Of course, technology does provide Africa with opportunities in everything from medicine to education. Small farmers receive commodity prices by SMS; East Africa is a world leader in micropayment technology; and Kenyan forces in Somalia use Twitter to warn the locals of upcoming attacks. But is that the whole story?
Oil and gas is Africa's major industry. Thirty years ago, oil refineries had a manned control room for each unit in the plant; modern telemetry and process control systems now allow just a couple of operators in a single control room to not only monitor a huge petrochemical complex but also hundreds of kilometres of pipeline. Brynjolfsson and McAfee referred to Google's 100 automated vehicles which have together driven 140,000 kilometres on busy roads without manual intervention; it's not too big a stretch of the imagination to think of fully automated underground mining - and with no strikes, no fatalities and limited ventilation requirements. Above ground, several storey high diggers and dump trucks already mine ore in open cast pits; contrast that with the thousands involved in digging Kimberley's big hole diamond mine back in the 1860's. Brynjolfsson and McAfee also cited studies documenting significant law firm productivity and quality improvements through use of scanning systems for discovery; application of graphical techniques and supercomputers are doing likewise for the geologists involved in Africa's resources sector.
Transport has been transformed. Ro-ro ships and automated crane systems allow the ubiquitous container to ship goods securely without intermediate handling. Several-kilometre long trains carry ore from mine to port to ship to Chinese furnace with no gangs of labourers wielding spades anywhere along the route. Africa is not noted for being a manufacturing giant, yet the state-of-the-art robots installed in South Africa's motor assembly plants give a hint of what is possible and probable in other plants. Increasingly factories are not going to be located where a workforce exists but instead at a location optimised for transport, energy, tax and input costs. In the financial and services sectors, ATMs, websites, micropayments and automated trading and back office systems have made clerks and brokers redundant. In fact, Martin Ford in his The Lights in the Tunnel book, calculates fully 40% of jobs, particularly professional knowledge management jobs, can be done by intelligent computer software. Postmen aren't needed to deliver E-mail.
Agriculture is the backbone of African society and the small scale African peasant farmer is the epitome of traditional rural Africa. South Africans bemoan the recent sharp reduction in the numbers of farmers and farm workers, not realising that output has increased, even if not sufficiently to feed a growing population. Observers have every right to worry about the huge swathes of farmland in newly independent South Sudan which have been snapped up by international agribusinesses. Using modern techniques, GPS guided tractors can plough, sow and harvest twenty four hours a day without the farmer stirring from updating his Facebook page indoors. Harvesting machines already stalk through orchards where once pickers balanced on ladders. Small farmers are being driven off the land.
Sure, Africa will continue to provide exotic holiday destinations for the limited number of global superstars. The IT industry will continue to see growth; while it's currently the growth in consumer applications that gets the media hype, in time it's going to be the productivity, job-cutting solutions that prevail. The World Bank estimates a 15% increase in mobile penetration translates into a 1.2% increase in African GDP; however, I wonder whether GDP per head of a fast growing population doesn't instead decline once you back out of the equation the billions paid for SIM cards, phones and connectivity each year?
As we complete our sweep across Africa's key business sectors, it becomes clear that Africa's economic growth is being generated by ever fewer people who together share the rewards. The big African winners are the international deployers of capital - with giant multinationals, commodity traders and wealth funds of all types displacing the pension funds of a diminishing world working population - allied to military-backed autocrats or psuedo democrats wanting their slice of the pie. The big losers are the growing unemployed, unemployable masses who throng Africa's burgeoning shanty towns.
In their final chapters, Brynjolfsson and McAfee paint a rosy - and to me unrealistic - picture of the virtues of technology for tomorrow's America. For us Africans, it raises far more serious questions. How much education should one give to someone who is never going to hold down a job? What bread and circuses, perhaps delivered via cell-phones, do the winners need to provide to prevent young losers rising in a Luddite revolt to demand their place at the trough? How bloated can a civil service get while at the same time using technology to improve service delivery or should states eschew eGovernment? Who will pay for cell-phones for the indigent and their infrastructure or is cell-phone penetration going to retreat till it just covers the very privileged few? Cell phones didn't exist in Maslow's time but I wonder whether they wouldn't top his hierarchy of needs for poor Africans today, so keeping this sector thriving?
If my dismal predictions are correct, what time frame are we talking about - ten years or more or less? Are North Africa's Arab uprisings among the first steps down the continent's slippery slope? It's clear governments nowhere understand the problem, let alone have the solutions. I don't have the numbers yet to confirm my suspicions nor answers to my own questions. I do so hope I am wrong or what, oh what, will our grandchildren inherit?
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