In the workshops of Sany’s truck plant in Changsha, China, the hum of robotics has all but drowned out the chatter of human workers.
The manufacturing giant is trialling humanoid machines on the final assembly line — traditionally the most human part of any factory.
The reasoning, as one executive told the Financial Times this week, is this: in labour-intensive industries, replacing people with robots is no longer science fiction. It’s what comes next.
China isn’t automating just to show off. It is automating out of demographic panic. Its working-age population is projected to plummet towards 300-million by the end of the century — one of the steepest demographic cliffs in human history.
Beijing’s solution is to aggressively substitute the labour it will soon lack with intelligent robots.
Last year China installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and it now manufactures the vast majority of the planet’s humanoids. The founder of JD.com, China’s largest retailer, warned that robots will “sooner or later” replace his 700,000 delivery drivers.
This should keep South Africa’s sleepy policymakers awake at night. China is racing towards robotics because it is running out of workers. The rest of the world will eventually adopt these machines, while sitting on huge, existing labour pools that may soon be displaced.
What’s in front of us now differs from every technological revolution that has come before. Previous waves changed the tools in a worker’s hands. This wave will remove the worker entirely. The implications are profound and disturbing.
The convergence of AI and robotics is coming for everyone, in every industry. It’s no longer only white-collar jobs at risk: in the next decade, smart robots are coming for blue-collar workers on the factory floor.
It would be naive, of course, to assume only job destruction lies ahead. This is capitalism on steroids. When the steam engine made craftsmen redundant, few foresaw the railways, the modern factory and the huge new middle class that followed.
Future jobs will be built on a bedrock of mathematics, science and software code. And that is precisely where South Africa is failing
This time, too, entirely new categories of work will emerge. But every one of those future jobs will be built on a bedrock of mathematics, science and software code. And that is precisely where South Africa is failing.
After three decades in power, the ANC has presided over a failing/failed education system that routinely ranks at or near the absolute bottom internationally in maths and science. The ANC’s time in office is thankfully ending soon; it has run the country into the ground, while much of the rest of the world has made significant advances. The political leaders who will replace it will not only have to fix the mess it has left behind but will quickly have to come to terms with a world that is changing profoundly.
The fact is, we are not producing the engineers, programmers and technicians that the new economy demands. We are barely producing numerate and literate school-leavers. A country that cannot impart these skills at scale to the next generation is headed for failure.
South Africa’s government survives by taxing the income of working people. As that income erodes through displacement — in a country where the expanded unemployment rate is already sitting at a catastrophic 41.9% — the tax base is at risk of collapsing with it.
Even China’s central planners can see the storm coming: their economists are already openly debating cutting personal income taxes, hiking corporate taxes and levying duties directly on the robots themselves.
In South Africa, we aren’t having this conversation. We aren’t even having the right version of the easier ones. We are totally unprepared for what’s coming.
While the developed world rewires its economies around machines that can think and move, we remain bogged down in the disputes of the last century — fighting over ownership and access in a rigid, 20th-century industrial framework.
The interminable, frustrating battle over Starlink licensing, for example, stalled by ideological squabbles over race ownership requirements, is a perfect case in point. We need to get over ourselves. We are fighting over the terms of how we connect to the world, while the technologies that will determine whether we matter at all simply move on without us.
China is building its automated future because it has looked at the numbers and been frightened into decisive action. South Africa has looked at precisely nothing. We are the deer in the proverbial headlights — transfixed, unprepared and with no idea of what is bearing down on us.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
