No people - just screens, terminals and handsets…

On arriving recently at the new Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow Airport I was struck by the car hire place - no people, just screens, terminals and handsets.

And in the parking terminal, machines that will tell you where you car is parked, just swipe your picking ticket or enter your car registration.

EU passport holders have since 2006 been issued with biometric passports with microchips in them, enabling them to pass seamlessly through automatic gates at border controls.

These new developments all reduce the need to employ people who do routine and repetitive jobs involving scanning, searching, paying and recording.

Supermarkets too are able to dispense with cashiers as customers scan items from their trolleys themselves into one device and pay (cash, credit or debit cards) into another:

And scanning devices are already being introduced in South African supermarkets – here is a ‘price-checking’ scanner at Checkers in Emmarentia:

Increasingly banks will exchange ‘brick and mortar’ branch networks for apps and cellphone-enabled technology as the safest and most secure customer offering, and banks of the future will look very different.

In case you think these developments are a long-way off for South Africa, here is the FNB branch in Hyde Park Shopping Centre:

I imagine that if banks and supermarkets in Europe are replacing recurrent employment costs with expenditure on technology then it is only going to be a short time before it happens here as well.  My local Checkers supermarket in Emmarentia employs probably well over 100 people, and we have no social contract in this country that says we need to preserve these jobs because of the social benefits of the incomes of the employees to them and their families, and of course our wider society.

These changes will not just impact on service sectors of the economy.  In mining, too, there are new developments that will enable remote-controlled mining, in which the rock face can be drilled by machines controlled from the surface:

  

What is driving these changes?

A nanometer is very small – a billionth of a meter long.  The world’s smallest microchip, unveiled in 2010, is just about nine nanometers in length.  Scientists are experimenting with ‘stacking’ microchips so as to be able to make faster and better cellphones (and military technology).  The problem is that they get very hot, so now they exploring how to use tiny amounts of fluid to keep them cool.

Microchips are unlikely to get much smaller, so now the innovation space is more concerned with how to expand their use.  More and more devices will become available with a multitude of uses that will change our lives.  And it is happening already.

We face the loss of perhaps hundreds of thousands of relatively low-paid, repetitive and relatively unskilled jobs as a result of new technologies in a short number of years – unless we can think very creatively and create a new social dispensation that has buy-in and active support from government, business and trade unions to address this question.  Currently there is little indication that this is understood by government and the trade union movement.

Government plans to create new jobs will be undermined by the impact of this technological transformation.  New jobs will have to be created in sectors that require skilled knowledge workers, in sectors such as tourism, beneficiation, information technology and so on.  Opportunities exist, arising from developments such as the Square Kilometer Array, chemical industry beneficiation etc, but these opportunities will critically require skilled people.  The loss of large numbers of relatively unskilled and low paid jobs cannot be countered easily and speedily by new job creation without a new and significant skills development plan coupled with an imaginative economic development strategy that has buy-in from all social partners.  The current National Development Plan may not be enough, especially in the context of our current conflictive political discourse.