BLESSING MBALAKA
Upon savouring my morning coffee and reading online tabloids, I stumbled upon an interesting commentary from Bloomberg.
The central argument raised during this commentary regarded the alarmingly high youth unemployment rate in China.
The findings found that China’s youth unemployment rate stood at a staggering 20.8%; this woeful statistic was worse than the national average, which stood at 5.2%.
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I began to ponder and investigate how South Africa and other African countries compared. The worrying statistic led to further pondering regarding how Artificial Intelligence may affect our escalating youth unemployment rates.
From a study by Trading Economics, which included Rwanda, Cape Verde, Morocco, Namibia, Angola, Nigeria, and South Africa, the only countries that saw a decline in their youth unemployment rate were Rwanda and Angola.
South Africa was the worst performer, with a worsening rate of 62.1%. The best performer in the study was Rwanda, which saw a reduction from 29.7% to 20.4%.
These figures suggest that Rwanda may be the most attractive country for youth in Africa.
Of course, general statistics are never a true indication of the contexts that affect these respective figures, for example, Zimbabwe’s economic woes are the culmination of various elements, which I will refrain from stating, out of fear of political retribution.
While South Africa has been largely affected by the asymmetrical ratio between skills and demand for these skills and, among others, apartheid legacies, The Career Junctions study corroborated this by stating that the most in demand industries suffered from supply shortages. If these supply shortages are bridged by AI and if less labour is required, it may unearth a serious problem for the world, and South Africa’s already dire unemployment reality.
The world is currently riddled with the dilemma of the future of work, and as large language models (LLMs) such as Facebook's Llama 2, a recently released open-source alternative to Open-AIs ChatGPT, encroach on the market, the skills gap may shrink, and technical roles may lose their job absorption capabilities, as developers begin to use such open-source code to engineer powerful productivity tools which reduce labour demand.
IBM CEO, Arvind Krishna, has been documented stating “I could easily see 30 percent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” Krishna told Bloomberg. In this statement, Arvid was referring to his company's discontinuation of 7800 job roles.
This erasure of job roles is something that could become common practice for companies around the world. In the pursuit of profit, this prediction is not far-fetched. It is something which has been seen in recent protests in Hollywood.
According to CNBC, over 11000 people took to the streets of Hollywood to protest against the encroachment of AI in their industries. CNBC interviewed Caleb Ward, who mentioned that visual artists, and creatives in the media are at risk from AI, which could replace their value with simple text-image or video prompts.
I worked as a photographer for a long time and witnessed this encroachment firsthand. It significantly increased my output and allowed me to produce more content faster, so this remark may disregard the potential increase in efficiency, an efficiency that could lead to increased profits.
An optimist could raise the question of how these tools act as potential equalisers for people without in-demand technical skills, thus enhancing their future employability. This is true; in the too distant past, creating a website was a daunting task, but now a website can be generated with a simple text prompt, and the same may be true for a lot of industries. Despite these benefits, there needs to be a bit of caution surrounding AI, especially considering that the technology is still in its infancy.
The more advanced AI becomes, the fewer employees may be required, and perhaps new roles. This is a perspective challenged by Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, who linked AI to a reduction in labour demand in their paper “Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Work”.
Buttressing Ryan Calo’s sentiments, One potential approach to mitigating this concern is the implementation of a profit-centred -Human-AI quota, or UBI (Universal basic income). A topic that I will discuss extensively in forthcoming publications. I do not tend to pick a position; I just look to discover, and as I read, the more concerned I become.
Nobody knows what the future holds, but one thing remains, it is imperative for us to ensure that we do not ignore the imminent risks due to blind optimism. If we are to enter this new age of AI and truly enhance it, AI needs planning and not blind faith in techno-fixes. It needs bodies established to ensure its imminent risks are mitigated.
Blessing Mbalaka is a technology enthusiast and junior researcher at the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation, University of Johannesburg.
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