As Google Uses AI for 25% of Coding Activities, Africa Must Invent A New Industrialization Policy

In Harvard Business Review in an article titled “Why Africa’s Industrialization Won’t Look Like China’s“, I wrote: “In its attempts to industrialize, Africa has looked toward China’s success. China designed and executed a policy that shrank the industrialization process in a mere 25 years — something many economies took at least a century to do. That redesign has brought immense dislocation in global commerce and industry, enabling China to become one of the world’s leading economies. African leaders have been pursuing policies designed to mimic China’s path.

“But despite these efforts, Africa has yet to advance in its industrialization at the same speed China did. Put simply, the things that worked for China will not work for Africa. Africa must change its focus: It must encourage internal consumption and intra-trade, push forward the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, create a single African currency, improve infrastructure, and invest in education”.

Today, we are learning that “Over 25% of Google’s code is now written by AI—and CEO Sundar Pichai says it’s just the start”.

Expanding my hypothesis: America and Western Europe will not just keep their factory jobs, they will also keep their graphic design, coding and similar jobs because robots and AI will do those jobs in their lands. The implication is massive: the entry level mundane jobs US companies used to outsource to the developing world, are now being disintermediated by AI, and would be done at home.

So, as Google pushes 25% of its coding jobs to AI, most of those coding schools in the developing world which have relied on winning those roles will be gone. Google only needs experienced coders as AI will do what the entry level guys used to do. Now you get why those big techs are firing people every quarter: as AI gets better, it will replace some of those making it better!

This is why those building coding schools in Africa to farm coders and techies for US and European companies must rethink. We just need to push our governments to understand that we must develop our local markets because AI is now a huge competitor in those cross-border remote jobs and roles! (We have explained how to navigate this transition in Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass program ).

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