Utopia or dystopia? Finland on the cutting edge bodes ill for South Africa

During a recent trip to Finland to see Sibanye-Stillwater’s lithium project there, I was walking to a restaurant in Helsinki and was startled to see a small box-shaped, six-wheeled robot with an orange flag trundling along the pavement.

A young woman emerged from a doorway and I asked her what it was.

“It’s my dinner,” she replied and proceeded to open the lid on top, pulling out a paper bag with her meal inside.

I subsequently learnt that this was part of the fleet of delivery robots operated by an Estonian company called Starship. It has made 10 million deliveries and counting in eight time zones.

These mini self-driving robots deliver hot food, groceries and industrial supplies. It’s all very hi-tech, and of course you need an app to order, pay for a delivery and open the lid to retrieve your goodies inside. And the robots are battery powered, so they plug right into the green energy transition.

The trip to see the lithium project saw us spend two nights in the quaint Finnish city of Kokkola, and there I was struck by our hotel not being staffed at night. You had a code to enter the building, your room, the adjoining gym and that ubiquitous feature of Finnish life, the sauna.

The rooms were also not made up until, presumably, we had left, and the only staff I saw were two women who prepared our breakfasts. And that was it.

How would such technologies be greeted in South Africa?

Well, on the Starship front, we have seen its future here, and it’s menacing.

The initial roll-out of Uber and then Bolt – the latter also an Estonian tech company – was greeted by a wave of violence and intimidation from the metered taxi industry. Although things have calmed significantly since then, most of the Gautrain ­stations remain “no-go” zones for Uber and Bolt drivers.

Such strong-arm tactics are deplorable but also explainable: when people’s livelihoods are at stake, they will often resort to extreme measures to put food on the table.

So, one can imagine how a roll-out of Starship delivery robots in South Africa would probably go down. The motorcycle delivery drivers for Checkers, Spar, Uber Eats and countless others – who are now a ubiquitous feature of the country’s urban streets – would not take this lightly.

The pavements and roads would soon be littered with the carcasses of smashed-up Starship delivery robots. They don’t come in armoured models.

Checkers and other drivers in recent years have represented a rare trend in South Africa – a sector that has delivered job growth as well as groceries and pizzas to your door. Replacing these guys with robots will be a bitter pill that they won’t swallow.

Or imagine a largely unstaffed hotel in South Africa? Among other things, the security concerns would be significant, and such a hotel would probably get on the radar screens of unions and potentially be a target for protests.

Worrying outlook for South Africa

But what I observed during my admittedly brief trip to Finland were paths the global economy is taking and the future of work – or the lack thereof – and it bodes ill for South Africa with its shocking levels of unemployment and chronic skills shortages.

I have already written about the stunning contrast between a Finnish mine and the operations where the lithium there is processed. All stages of the production process are either highly mechanised, automated or digitised.

The open-cast mine itself only had 63 employees – a fraction of the number of people underground at any given time at Sibanye’s gold and platinum group metals mines in South Africa.

It goes without saying that fuel stations in Finland are automated and self-service, and many are unstaffed – which is the case now in virtually all advanced economies.

Imagine trying to do that in South Africa? The first fuel station to experiment with that would probably get trashed or petrol-bombed.

This is a major challenge for South Africa as the global economy maintains an accelerating trajectory – now aided and abetted by the unfolding AI revolution – that requires far less human labour while raising productivity and profits.

This matters because it means South Africa is falling behind on the productivity front, and an economy that is heavily reliant on manual labour – be it rock drill operators in a mine, cleaning staff at a hotel, Uber Eats drivers or fuel station attendants – will ultimately be less competitive and attract less foreign investment.

Relatively cheap labour suddenly seems expensive if no human is required to do the task at hand.

Against this backdrop, calls for measures such as a universal income grant or wealth tax will take on new urgency and must be seriously scrutinised as policy options.

The ranks of the millions of South Africans who currently can’t find jobs will swell when such trends take hold here, and this must happen sooner rather than later if the economy is to remain competitive on a fast-changing global stage. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.