16 Leaders The Economist February 26th 2022
are either facing criminal charges or fear they soon might.
The courts have been weakened from within as well as with
out. The chief justice helps manage the court system in addition
to making rulings. But under Mogoeng Mogoeng, who retired
last year, the bench was rarely at its full complement. Cases piled
up. The Judicial Services Commission (jsc), a body made up of
lawyers and political appointees that advises on court picks, has
become a political pantomime dominated by the Economic
Freedom Fighters (eff), a hardleft party. The jschas rejected
strong white candidates for jobs at the highest court. Candidates
of all races are increasingly at risk of personal attacks.
Mr Ramaphosa needs to get a grip. He must choose a chief
justice who unmistakably adheres to the principles of the con
stitution.The president could further boost public confidence
in the broader criminaljustice system if he sacked the hopeless
police chief and police minister, overhauled the dilapidatedlower courts and gave prosecutors the resources to go after graft.
South Africa is in a fragile state. The failings of the postapart
heid era are leading ever more of its citizens to question the vir
tues of democracy. Populists like Julius Malema of the effand
Herman Mashaba of Actionsaare attracting converts. The sim
plistic remedies they peddle are alluring. A poll last year sug
gested that twothirds of the country would forgo elections if an
authoritarian leader could curb crime and hardship. Mandela’s warning
It is therefore vital to protect the Constitutional Court as the last
line of defence for democracy. At its inauguration, Mandela
warned the country “to stand on guard not only against direct as
sault on the principles of the constitution, but against insidious
corrosion”. Both now menacethecourts. South Africa must heed
his words before it is too late.nT
he word“robot” was coined in 1920 bytheCzechplaywright
Karel Capek. In “R.U.R.” (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”) Ca
pek imagined artificial, fully functional servants. For most of
their history, however, robots have been dumb, inelegant me
chanical devices sitting out of sight in factories.
Things are starting to change, however. Robots have benefit
ed from rapid innovations in smartphones, which brought
cheap cameras and sensors, fast wireless communications and
powerful, smaller computer chips. More recent advances in
machine learning have added software to make robots better in
formed about their surroundings and equipped them to make
wiser decisions. Robots are leaving carefully managed industri
al settings for everyday life and, in the coming years, will
increasingly work in supermarkets, clinics, social care and
much more (see Science & technology section).
They could not be coming at a better time.
Many industries are facing a shortage of la
bour—the demand for workers has recovered
much faster than expected from the pandemic
and some people have left the workforce, par
ticularly in America. Warehousing has grown
rapidly thanks to the ecommerce boom. Ro
bots are now indispensable, picking items off
shelves and helping people pack an exponentially rising num
bers of boxes. They are even beginning to trundle slowly along
some pavements, delivering goods or food right to people’s
doors. In a pandemicravaged world, short of workers but with
lots of elderly folk to look after, having more robots to boost pro
ductivity would be a good thing.
And yet many people fear that robots will destroy jobs. A pa
per in 2013 by economists at Oxford University was widely mis
interpreted as meaning that 47% of American jobs were at risk of
being automated.
In fact, concerns about mass unemployment are overblown.
The evidence suggests robots will be disruptive but ultimately
beneficial for labour markets. Japan and South Korea have the
highest robot penetration but very strong workforces. A YaleUniversitystudythat lookedat Japanese manufacturing be
tween 1978 and 2017 found that an increase of one robot unit per
1,000 workers boosted a company’s employment by 2.2%. Re
search from the Bank of Korea found that robotisation moved
jobs away from manufacturing into other sectors, but that there
was no decrease in overall vacancies. Another study, by re
searchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and col
leagues elsewhere, looked at Finnish firms and concluded that
their use of advanced technologies led to increases in hiring.
For all that, the march of the robots will bring big changes to
workplaces. The skills and firms that are rewarded will shift, too.
But that need not be the disaster many fear. One supposed exam
ple of “bad automation” is selfservice checkouts in supermar
kets, because they displace human workers. But this is hardly
dystopian—robots could perform work, such as
butchering, that is unpleasant or stigmatised
(see Bartleby). Checkout staff who retrain to
help customers pick items from aisles may well
find that dealing with people in need is more re
warding than spending all day swiping bar
codes in front of lasers.
Inevitably, some people will be on the losing
end of change even as the robots make society
as a whole better off. One lesson from the freewheeling globali
sation of the 1990s and 2000s is that the growth in trade that was
overwhelmingly beneficial triggered a political backlash, be
cause the losers felt left behind (see Free exchange). That is one
more reason why firms and governments would do well to re
cognise the value of retraining and lifelong learning. As jobs
change, workers should be helped to acquire new skills, includ
ing how to work with and manage the robots that will increas
ingly be their colleagues.
The potential gains from the robot revolution are huge. In Ca
pek’s play, the robots revolt against their human masters and
cause mass unemployment and worse. The beginnings of the
world’s real robots have not matched Capek’ssatire.There is no
reason to think that their future needs to either.nThe world should welcome the rise of smart machinesRise of the robots
Workplace automation