Resisting the rise of the robots

A strike looms in the banking sector over the loss of jobs as banks close branches, supposedly an inevitable result of the move to internet banking. McDonald’s has introduced self-service kiosks, and Ster-Kinekor has added automated snack ordering to its automated ticket system.

This is happening in a country where the official unemployment rate rose to 29% in the second quarter of 2019, and the expanded unemployment rate, including discouraged work seekers, hit 38.5%. That means more than a third of people in the country who could work are not able to work. And let’s not forget that around 50% of the population is considered chronically poor, according to one measure.

No one want to be a modern version of the Luddites of the First Industrial Revolution, who smashed the weaving machines in a vain attempt to stop their jobs vanishing. However, technology sometimes seems to be no guarantee even of material progress, let alone the spiritual promise in Nikola Tesla’s supposed prediction: “In the twenty-first century, the robot will take the place which slave labour occupied in ancient civilisation.”

We were once assured that mechanisation would relieve us of the pressure of long work hours, and, since “leisure is the basis of culture”, give us richer inner lives. What we didn’t expect was instant and constant connectivity intruding into our leisure hours, and the decline of formal employment in favour of outsourcing and contracts, making work harder and more precarious. Rich inner life is out of the picture.

The march of technology symbolised by the 4IR seems inexorable, unstoppable, all-encompassing, as did “globalisation”, another term the WEF was so fond of at the start of the millennium and which some argue is among, other things, an ideologically loaded privileging of multinational business interests over democratic sovereignty.

This technological and economic determinism must be resisted. We have a choice. Business, for a start, could divert some of the billions from corporate charitable giving and executive pay to keeping, and maybe even creating, more real jobs. Corporate social responsibility should not be an add-on, but at the heart of the business.

An example exists in South Africa of technology being left to one side and leading to a situation that helps stem job losses as well as enhancing the customer experience. Garage forecourts feature attendants who fill cars with petrol or diesel, wash windscreens, and check tyre pressure, water and oil, for free. This could easily be replaced by self-service pumps. The unwritten contract in South Africa is that the fuel stations employ attendants in return for continued regulation of the fuel industry, a situation that serves almost everyone.