AI’s Economic Distortion: As Advanced Countries Keep Their Manufacturing At Home, Africa’s Competitors Are Robots And AI
The Oasis Reporters
January 3, 2024
By Prof. Ndubuisi Ekekwe
“As robotics and AI advance, most countries will keep their production processes at home, eliminating the need for cheaper labor abroad.
In this redesign, Africa’s competitor is not China; robots and AI are the real competitors. Africa can no longer depend on global manufacturing to become industrialized, nor can it simply mimic China’s policies.”
AI will bring a massive redesign in Africa’s relationships with the Western world.
Already, artificial intelligence (AI) has distorted and disintermediated the business model of hiring remote techies from the developing world, for core jobs in many advanced economies.
I am not talking of freelancing jobs where you are paid to make a logo for $30. I am talking of being employed in the technical design teams of firms like IBM, Cisco and Facebook’s Meta, at a salary range of $80,000 per year while living in Lagos or Nairobi!
Yes, all the leading companies offering remote-tech-placement services in Africa have either changed their CEOs or reduced operations.
Simply, as AI penetrates into markets, many business models will be retired.
For those remote coders, AI is now the entry level coders, displacing the entry level engineers in Lagos, Accra and Bombay, just as I predicted in my 2019 piece in Harvard. In other words, AI will keep most of the jobs America and Europe have outsourced.
If you are reading me, I challenge you to have a career plan, not just a job plan, because as AI makes progress, the core essence of most jobs will be questioned. Yes, a job is not the same thing as a career!
Comments:
“Insightful perspective! Africa must adapt swiftly to the AI-driven global redesign by focusing on innovation, skill development, and value creation. Building careers, not just jobs, is the way forward. Let’s position Africa as a leader in unique, non-automatable solutions globally”
“As a software engineer myself, I don’t agree with AI eliminating entry level engineers. I see it more like a tool that will enhance productivity, I also see AI as a technology that will create more jobs in this space”.
Abiodun Oni
@abbeyman01
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