Here is an important contrast. The author describes speaking to a development practitioner from Uganda, who highlighted job creation for young people being one of the major challenges for the country. 64% of unemployed there are between 18 and 30 years old. At the same time, local airports switched to fully automated parking system, requiring no staff. Why, the author asks, are the world’s scarcest economic resources devoted to economizing one of the world’s most abundant economic resources? Here, the scarce resources stand for entrepreneurial ability and top percentile of intelligence, concentrated in tech hubs such as Silicon Valley. There is a lot to unpack there, and I let you to read the article yourself.
But, do guess when the article was published … not in this year, not in the one before, but in 2017! 2017! We are in 2025, and this contrast is even sharper than back then. We continue to displace an abundant resource, that of human labor. By the way, if you are not convinced human labor is abundant, which I forgive you because exactly the opposite has been dominating populist, anti-immigration, discourse (if I may call it that) nearly everywhere, read The Future of Immigration Policy in Europe & Africa (tl;dr: labor is abundant, but we erect and fortify barriers against its free movement, which makes it appear locally scarce).
As automation becomes more powerful, it also becomes more pervasive. It is by far not only the unskilled labor that we (decide to?) do away with. And it is long not just entrepreneurial ability and intelligence we spend on this either. Whole new power plants are being built to power and cool data centers required by AI. The environmental impacts are massive, and it all appears fairly short-sighted.
Robotics is the hottest thing in AI now, and African population continues to surge, as does its unemployment. Why then, are we using the world’s scarcest resources to automate the abundant ones? I do not have a good answer.