The automation paradox

If you walk into a McDonald's in Singapore or Hong Kong, you can place your order through digital touchscreens and make payments through the POS machines attached to them. A few years ago, there were three or four cash counters. Today, most restaurants have only one. At Uniqlo Singapore, you can place your clothes in a basket next to the screen, the system scans the barcodes, displays the total amount due, and you can check out through the POS without speaking to anyone. Grocery stores in Singapore adopted self-checkout counters years ago.

Recently, Swapno introduced self-checkout at selected outlets in Dhaka. In countries like Singapore, South Korea and Japan, where population growth is zero or negative, automation has become the way forward. It addresses labour shortages and reduces costs. In advanced economies, many do not want to do these repetitive jobs, and it is difficult to recruit foreign workers, train them and familiarise them with local culture.

While automation makes sense in many East Asian countries, is it the way forward for us in a country with high unemployment and a growing young population?

We can delay technology adoption, but we cannot stop the inevitable. In our childhood, typists outside the High Court and in offices made a living by typing documents. That profession disappeared with the arrival of word processors and then PCs and laptops. We became our own typists.

Today, with robots able to clean floors, take orders at restaurants and perform security duties, the question is what will happen to the thousands of jobs at the bottom of the pyramid. Even gig economy work, like food delivery, could be taken over by drones. The garment industry is moving towards automation and 3D printing, which could make thousands of jobs redundant and lead to social unrest. Driverless cars could soon make the role of drivers obsolete.

Human nature tends to seek comfort and resist change. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and hope that automation will pass us by. It will affect us in more profound ways than we imagine. We must prepare our current and future workforce for this shift.

First, we need to change the mindset that education ends at graduation. Learning and skills training must continue throughout professional life, whether through self-learning or institutional programmes.

Second, our education curriculum needs a significant transformation, with a greater focus on skills and technology. Students should be prepared for the jobs of the future, which will demand training in areas such as Agentic AI, robotics and cyber security. There will also be high demand for nursing and primary health care due to ageing populations, especially in overseas markets like East Asia.

We must prepare the next generation not just to survive the automation wave but to navigate it wisely and seize opportunities in the new economy. This will promote social justice, support social mobility and help us make full use of the rare population dividend we currently enjoy in Bangladesh.

The writer is former regional head of supply chain finance at Citibank, NA, and former head of product and platform solutions at TASConnect, a Standard Chartered Ventures portfolio company