Autonomous vehicles hence a driver-less Uber at your doorstep at the push of a button, Self-healing power grids, pizzas delivered by drones, 3D printed houses, and many more; who would have thought, 20 years ago? That this virus automation would rampantly spread and shake the industrial space and the workplace. Well, it is not news anymore that automation, just as technology generally, is expected to improve exponentially thanks to advancements in Softwares, Vision systems, Sensors and Machine Learning technology in general.
Robotics was once a thing of fictional movies, or at least ambitious techies who tried to forecast technological trends. Not anymore! Robots are invading homes and taking up chores. Talk of robotic vacuum cleaners. These autonomous vacuum cleaners have been intelligently programmed to clean. Now people despise vacuuming. They would rather utilize that time in more productive activities. As small as the chores may seem, it is just an indication of how automation is attacking our lives.
Unemployment is a critical challenge in developing nations, especially in Africa. And so is the recruitment process. The routine process of sifting through an ocean of applications is not only rigorous but also ineffective and can promote bias. Being a routine task, there are tools that can efficiently and effectively handle this task. A well-programmed hiring tool can and will save time during the HR processes. There are questions raised about hiring processes, especially in public institutions. People who don’t qualify for certain positions have been hired due to a lack of a consistent hiring process. Such tools are also able to collect data from the applicants, and down the road, you are able to revisit the database once a position, that better fits the applicants who missed out, opens up. As easy as that, you are able to eliminate schemes that are overly bureaucratic and complex.
Talking of unemployment, automation is a big contributor to it. Many of the current jobs, especially in advanced economies are dominated by automation. These are the jobs that involve a lot of routine activities. Machines love this. After all, “they’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” In other words, this is a colossal disruption in the workplace. So how do we reduce machines to just augmenters of our jobs? The answer is simple. Doing what machines cant and looking at automation as an enabler to optimize processes.
And here is the advantage machines hold against us. They are able to process larger data sets with more speed and accuracy, at a rate the human mind is not able to keep up with.
Despite previous conclusions that non-routine jobs are not at risk of automation, these trends in data processing render such assurances shaky at best. Work Fusion, for instance, a US-based software company, sells software to automate non-routine tasks which were previously cocooned from the reach of automation, this is according to the African Talent Company.
There are vast opportunities in Africa to explore this disruption. It is a chance for us to augment our productivity through optimizing processes. It could be a little too late to follow the traditional developmental stages. However, we can leapfrog to the current and future trends. With population growth of an extra 1.3 billion people expected in Africa, equipping them with requisite skills that are technologically sane will make Africa boast an influential workforce that will drive development. And that centers on machine learning and the Internet of Things.
