Amazon’s Alexa, an  intelligent personal assistant, discriminates. It struggles with my nice Nigerian accent. It gets so bad that most times I just give up.  Sure, it is not Alexa’s problem. It is also not my problem. But someone has to make it easy for me to participate in the voice-activated ecosystem.

My accent is truly Nigerian. I keep working to make sure I do not lose it. It gives me confidence and I like it when people ask me: Are you from Nigeria? I work on it making sure that I keep the vowels in the purest of way.

But since I got Echo/Alexa, that accent seems to be on its own.  I used to ask for “redy made” cloth instead of “already made” cloth, many years ago in primary school. I knew I ate many “biscuit bones” when I had in mind “brisket bones”. Coming with that background, I am making life harder for Alexa.

There is a huge problem. With virtually no participation from our region in this space, Paris, Silicon Valley, London will train for their voices. The Voice AI race may just forget the Nigerian accent. Everything we dream about voice AI could stall.  This is one of those areas where we can be left behind despite the huge opportunity voice offers to Nigeria.

We like to talk. We rarely enjoy writing. In short, without colonization, it is possible Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba would not be in written forms today. But now, Voice AI systems are coming to our domain (yes, talking), but our accent could hinder progress.

If you are dreaming, there is a business opportunity here. After all, the BBC has gone pidgin. Alexa needs to interpret that also. This is huge because in the next ten years, translators will be gone like typists and our phones will do translations synchronously. The question is this: Will Nigerians be part of that? Only our entrepreneurs can help, because that is not a Silicon Valley problem.

In this contemporary time, the most dynamic and evolving human field is engineering or technology depending on your choice. Such an observation may seem at first to be a mere truism but closer considerations of its impacts in medicine, entertainment, energy and security will rapidly dispel any such dismissive judgment.

Engineering is transforming all fields. Future medicine looks as a field where robots will seamlessly help doctors and surgeons get patients back to work or home quicker and healthier. The future of global energy looks promising because engineers are breaking barriers daily in the quest to deliver affordable, efficient and clean sources of power.

From entertainment to security, nothing is spared. Today’s wars are technology wars fuelled by engineering geniuses acquired, advanced and processed over centuries. The bravery of a modern warlord is the engineering feat of someone who may never have to shoot. We are living in an era where discovery is not celebrated, not because they have become easier, but because they are happening regularly.

Engineering practice has changed so much and in a radical form from what it was a few decades ago. The global energy problem is engineering problem. The global health challenge is an engineering problem, and daily engineers are faced with burdens to solve major world problems. While the politicians enact the energy bills, the engineers make the energy practically available.

The bold and optimistic challenge to help engineer bio-grade artificial human organs is an assessment that managing what Nature gives us has limitations. Why not get a new artificial brain if the one that exists is not functioning because of disease?

The Challenges

But these advances pose serious ethical challenges which the engineers are not providing answers. In most cases, that is not their job; someone has to regulate them and put them on the path of keeping sanity on this earth.

But regulating these activities is unfortunately not easy. One technology could do well but could also be harmful. In this case, the problem is not the technology, but the application and usage. It is like saying because nuclear technology could kill en mass, it must be banned in hospitals where they are used in many critical treatments.

But for a moment, let us leave the technical aspect of engineering progress. I am already aware that many cotton farmers in Sudan could be out of jobs if some of the experiments on lab production of cotton in universities in US and European schools work out. We could be creating security crises where suddenly the commodity market is destroyed because nanotechnology has provided alternatives to rubber, cotton and hosts of other materials. People will be out of jobs and crises will start everywhere.

My concern is the disparity in engineering development between the developed and developing world. The rich nations are pushing the limits while the poor are not contributing much. It is not that they do not want to contribute, they want but the environment does not enable them. We lose their ideas and perspectives, unfortunately.

Can the future of engineering be structured such that these people can get on the pathway of creativity and innovation? Can the world and technical associations provide an effective system, where boys and girls in developing countries could help to solve the global engineering challenges? How can this be done? In short, how can companies begin to give people at the bottom of the pyramid opportunities to shape the products that are designed for them?

The same problem that has undermined our abilities to solve major poor people’s diseases is what is affecting the ability of the world to provide technology in ways that the poor people can use them. Exporting Smartphone to people that just need the simplest phone is not a great strategy.

Developing GloCal Mindset

The world needs a redesign: we need a new way in looking at things. It will be tough because there are many components to the engineering question. A drug company may prefer developing drugs for cancer over malaria because people that suffer malaria may not bring good revenue. Yes, those that engineer drugs consider business before the quest to save lives. But there could be a balance. Why not have a system where engineering goes global and local at the same time? They can solve the drug dilemma, with their global expertise, but localized at scale for each market.

Answering, understanding and managing emerging developments of meeting the needs of every customer (yes, the broad and specific needs), in the highly fragmented world market will define the future of engineering. It will show our readiness to solve the world’s problems. It will make engineering fresh before all global citizens. It is going gloCal- having a world global strategy, but acting local in each market or community. It means helping people solve local problems with global ideas.

If we begin to do that, we have the possibility of solving these problems. It is so shameful that in a world of so much knowledge, many are very poor and dying. We have solved the refrigeration problem in Boston, but in a small village in Ghana, the citizens have no light and refrigerators do not have any value there. So, can we say we have indeed solved how to preserve food?

The global food problem is an engineering problem. Even in Africa, they have enough during the harvesting season. But immediately that season is gone, many become hungry because they could not preserve the excess. So, you have a system where a man that threw away a basket of excess fresh tomatoes a month before is looking for a canned tomato for his family. What if he has preserved the fresh ones? We need solutions.

Now is the time to redefine what engineering research is. People at the bottom of the pyramid are not interested in nanotechnology and genome project. They just want simple ways to live and if entities can understand those challenges by providing simplicity through engineering, everyone can look at engineering future with optimism.

My African kinsmen care not if you can travel to Mars. You have not assisted them to preserve the mangoes they harvested to last longer and feed their families. So while the Mars race is on, they expect to find ways to store their excess food. If that happens, they can confidently look at the future of discovery and engineering with hope. A little support and devoting the engineering powers of the advanced nations to the “nonsense challenges” of the developing world could solve many problems.

There are engineering challenges across the developing nations and it is time we put resources to solve them instead of being obsessed with sending private ships to the moon. Engineering must be global and yet adaptable to local needs:- we need gloCal engineering for the future. Let engineers be engineers, irrespective of boundaries and make this world a better place. Until then, many will not understand why they matter. That process will help us make GloCal products. We have hailed legends that created products like iPhone and Tesla Motors. But always remember that in most places like Chad and Myanmar, the iPhone feat is just a cup of clean water. Right now, that clean water is not possible. And that is bad. The world will hail people that think global even as they help locals have solutions they need to live.

Today, in Nigeria, anyone with more than fifteen years of working experience, who loses a job in banking, telecom and oil & gas sectors will be very lucky to find new employment that pays similar wages and benefits. Being a largely poor country, Nigeria does not have much use of experienced professionals at the top of the management pyramid. A banker departs banking sector and not many other sectors can absorb that individual because few have capacities for the top-notch experience. Also, because of the size of the markets, the companies weed the pyramids so early. If 1000 people join the banking industry in a year, after 15 years, less than 20% will remain. There is a preference, over time, of using lower experienced people, and that pushes many experienced people out of the industry. This is not just in the banking industry; Nigerian military, the Police, etc all do the same.

What is happening is a redesign of  systems as a result of technology and productivity. You do not need too much experience to do a lot of things very well. So as you age with experience, you become expensive compared to a younger person who can effectively deliver that job at lower cost.

Indeed, Nigeria is undergoing a transformation that is breaking social systems from Kano to Lagos. Stock market crises, unpaid public sector salaries and series of other problems have seriously affected many key stakeholders, in both the private and public sectors, around the country. Everything has changed. Being a university graduate is not enough for a decent living wage. That seems to be the smallest denominator in Nigeria.

The Dislocation

Nigeria has a new normal: economic uncertainties until it can decouple its existence on petroleum. We are struggling with roadmaps on how to navigate out of the valley of spiraling economic difficulties. In this convoluted world with high level of interconnectivity, one economic problem leads to another. Nothing seems to be working in fixing the economy. Sure, the nation is making progress.

The national unemployment rate is rising and what used to be the problem of the uneducated citizens is creeping into the world of experienced professionals. Unfortunately, the rate is not going down anytime soon. Why? Besides the fact that our formal economy sector has not significantly expanded,  many other things are in play. As Elon Musk had noted, the future of human workforce will be challenged. We will have the  byte and bit workforce but that will be limited. Even before the expected disruption of AI, powered by supercomputers, to compete with humans, Nigeria is already seeing the impacts. Nigerian banking is seeing productivity owing to deployment of technology, from ATM to Mobile Banking, resulting to dislocation of workforce.

As technology penetrates, we will continue to experience displacement across all the key industrial sectors, at global level. We have already phased out the industry that hires special secretaries to work the typewriting machines. The ticket masters have been replaced by websites. Increasingly, apps and websites are offering professional counseling from finance to romance that humans used to do. A new generation of smartphones will displace the language interpreters, when we have mature language translators inbuilt in our phones. Today, an engineer equipped with computer aided design tools will do better than ten engineers a century ago.

In nearly all industries, technology is enabling firms to do more with lesser human power. Human productivity has consistently improved over the centuries and our standards of livings have correlated with it. However, while the industrial age technologies made sense of the factors of production of labor and land, the new age calls for knowledge. Through robotics and automation, hundreds of man-hours can be replaced with a simple machine that never asks for benefits.

For Nigeria, that maturity level is still far. If the country industrializes, we will expand our economy. That will create more jobs in the long-term. That should be our concern before we begin to think of displacement of labor in the long-term. Our challenge is making sure we can actually industrialize.

Digital Startups Will Not Save The Day

We all like our fintech. We like internet. Nigeria is going through the digital front. They are very critical. So, unlike the industrial economy, having more startups may not translate to more jobs, because in most cases those startups create technologies that eliminate more human jobs across the industries. You can run an Internet-only bank with 15 staff if you deploy AI, cloud and many other emerging technologies, at scale.

Specifically, for every one person that is hired in most Internet startups, a displacement could result to, at least, loss of two jobs across all sectors. When ten parents decide to use a website to help their kids improve their mathematics skills, part-time teachers are displaced. When a big bank opens a web portal that enables customers to make informed decisions, financial planners will be cut. In general, who needs a stock picker, when most websites offer quality analyses free? Our society is changing, and people and firms must give things free to compete. That is why websites that require subscriptions are seldom popular.

This is a global redesign and it is very important that policymakers understand that what worked in 1960 may not necessarily work now. Information is moving fast and the reaction of the consumer is spontaneous. They are being rewired through online communal ties resulting to new patterns of lifestyles.

Nevertheless, what we are seeing today is just the beginning. The future of the African continent is one where many people will be unemployed unless we can do what other advanced economies did: industrialize at scale. This is besides any effort to digitize. We will continue to innovate, digitally, however, that will not create enough jobs to change the trajectory of continental unemployment rate. Our efforts on digital are ephemeral with no core industrialization component. Unlike the advanced nations, we are not connecting into the transformation of industries. We are simply seating on vapors of imaginations. Those will work, but they will not produce scale that will put millions to work. Anyone that tells you that more farm apps and websites will create more farming jobs over industrialization of agricultural systems (e.g. processing of farm output) is not honest. But funding apps makes us feel good. That is unfortunate.

The biggest crisis is coming. It will come when nanotechnology would have matured from lab to the market. First, it will help displace millions of cotton, rubber and agricultural workers across the globe when engineers can make these devices in the lab. They can hire fifty people to produce the same quantity of cotton one million people produce in Sudan. They will displace those workers and clusters of wars would take place across the developing world.

There would be unprecedented cycles of revolutions as unemployment increases. Commodity market will morph into technology market and millions will lose heritage and culture because human innovation has disrupted them. I have called this the ‘war of nano’.

As we indulge and celebrate the innovations we witness everyday in technology, it is important to note that nothing like this has ever existed. A man can become a media company, without a distribution network and the delivery men. A company can exist entirely on Internet, cutting off all the real estate professionals. A bank that used to employ 5000 staff could use 60 people because it has modernized its infrastructure. Technology is competing with us and we are losing the battle.

Yet, most governments seem not to understand what is going on. When you continue to measure the characteristics of the knowledge economy with the tools of the industrial economy, the world cannot be governed right. Pushing government funds to create startups and new companies in the hope of reducing unemployment could be fallacious. This is not an industrial age new companies that hire in legions. The best companies work to eliminate head counts with the powers of microprocessors. From US to UK, human productivity due to technology has accelerated faster than job creation and the old labor equilibrium distorted.

It will be hard for any government policy to radically change the structure of labor in the long-term since daily we are encroaching into new territories with new technologies. The launch of Google created millionaires, but also crushed many industries. Sure, it created new industries, but those employ fewer workers, in average. It looks so evident that the cinema, bookstores and all those traditional networks that employ humans will be completely replaced with websites in the near future. Unfortunately, the business model of internet is knowledge-based, requiring few skilled workers. Unlike the factory model, it takes just a few to run those companies. But for most industrialized countries, this balances out. They can have these firms and still create jobs because they have resilient anchors: the infrastructures. That is different in Africa.

The Opportunity

Nigeria needs to understand that increased productivity and technology penetration will change our labor model, forever. Now is the time to begin that process of designing systems to manage our society. We must change the way students are trained and educated.

Our present education model is job-centric: the brightest students expect to be hired. That is why most companies are not created by the valedictorians and best students, but middle of the pack who struggle sometimes to get good jobs. The former gets accelerated corporate infusion and they rarely have to create new firms. With getting job in mind, our education loses the very purpose of education: the liberation of the mind. Until we change that paradigm to enable students get mental and entrepreneurial readiness, many will be unemployed. The truth is that anyone with skills, in anything, has a big market to succeed today than ever. Focusing on that element of personal discovery will help students prepare to graduate in a society of fewer jobs and prosper.

Globally,  governments must modernize those industrial age tools they use to track unemployment. There are thousands across the developed world that make decent livings on web ventures, yet are classified unemployed because no one has developed the right tools to capture the ‘informal Internet labor’. Technology makes it possible for people to build personal wealth in Beijing while living in San Francisco, and technically classified unemployed. This supports my notion that lack of quality data is affecting government ability to develop a strategy to reduce unemployment since most of the ‘unemployed’ people are working. That technology that displaces jobs through higher productivity can also help improve government statistics.

For Nigeria, we need to focus more on the industrial systems because the idea that we can leapfrog bad roads, inadequate electricity, and good education is an illusion. No website, no matter how dynamic can fix that. Besides supporting digital companies, the government must ensure it has a plan to deepen our meatspace companies that build the core infrastructure. A vision that will make government to understand that funding a postal system will be more catalytic than giving grants to e-commerce startups which will surely struggle without a functioning postal system.

Now is the time: we must create opportunities at the top, by expanding our economies. We can win the war of nano, bits and bytes, if we prepare well.