If Checkers gets its smart trolley system right, it could make a nice bit of money on that – by licensing it abroad.
In the US, Tesla is trying to catch up with Google-owned Waymo on self-driving taxis. In parts of China, autonomous drones are delivering takeaways. India and Brazil are both getting pretty serious about self-driving tractors.
And in South Africa, it is unlawful for a petrol station to allow a customer to operate the pump.
European retailers are desperately trying to convince customers to use self-checkout and scan-as-you-shop systems, because the cost of labour is killing them. The trolley idea might just fly there.
Parts of Asia are also utterly committed to productivity, even when they have surplus labour, and they're willing to try anything once. Shoprite could have a nice export market for its integrated-checkout trolleys with added in-store navigation.
South Africa, on the other hand, long ago established a broad political agreement to eschew most of the productivity and efficiency tools that are essential in labour-poor countries. Productivity SA may preach "global competitiveness" as a tool to grow employment, but nobody in politics or policy or regulation actually believes that. When roads are built, they want to see shovels, not bulldozers, because that is what local communities and unions demand, and it looks good in the project metrics.
Shoprite could have a nice export market for its integrated-checkout trolleys with added in-store navigation.
With a blind eye here and a compromise there, that socio-economic compact has worked, after a fashion. New technologies were introduced slowly, and only slowly pushed out people. Slowly enough that you could rarely point to a specific technology and a specific group of jobless people and blame one on the other.
Where there was major disruption due to new technology, there was also sometimes a flowering of job opportunities at the unskilled end of the spectrum, such as e-commerce's need for delivery drivers.
But Europe and China and the US are no longer talking about the type of disruption where one service supplants another, or about incremental increases in productivity. They don't expect the equivalent of desktop computers slowly rolling out across businesses and slowly replacing paper-based systems. They are talking about hyperleaps into hyperproductivity, new systems that can, nearly overnight, replace entire swathes of knowledge workers.
If the more optimistic projections about melding new-gen AI with new-gen robotics are anywhere near correct, unskilled and semi-skilled labour won't be far behind.
South Africa can keep a lid on it to a certain extent. Only the state gets to build roads, and the state gets to set wages for road builders. If the state wants to keep road-building robots out but roads affordable, it can make that happen. It arguably shouldn't, but it can.
That just doesn't work elsewhere in the economy. The choice becomes having near-autonomous factories, or shipping raw materials offshore to be used in near-autonomous factories in other countries.
At some point, even the most delusional political groupings will do the maths, and reconcile themselves to a rising tide lifting all ships, and trickle-down economics, and other direction-water metaphors.
Elsewhere in the world, governments are trying to get out of the way, reducing regulatory hurdles and throwing their weight behind the necessary infrastructure and education for AI and autonomous systems. The last thing they're thinking about is taxing them.
South Africa is not like those places. In South Africa, taxing hyperproductivity will speed acceptance.
You can't entirely pre-empt revulsion at a trolley that does the work of a cashier, but you can link it to new government revenue that can fuel a basic income grant.
It won't mollify those in the kind of employment that is most at risk, but it just so happens there are a lot of people who aren't in any kind of employment at all. Secure the support of that constituency, which would otherwise be the last to benefit from hyperproductivity, and SA could be in with a chance as the world changes around it.
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