Local Companies Urged To Accelerate Automation -- Johari - BernamaBiz

TEXT START: Local companies of all sizes need to accelerate automation in operations and production as the future supply of foreign workers is unlikely to match current levels, said Investment, Trade and Industry Minister Datuk Seri Johari Abdul Ghani.

The Dissection

The article presents automation as a pragmatic response to an impending foreign-worker shortage. Its real function is to recast labor displacement as industrial modernization while reassuring local workers that they are not the intended victims.

The key sentence is the forum’s unresolved question: “who creates and owns value as AI increasingly shapes the future economy.” The article raises the ownership problem, then abandons it. It discusses adoption, wages, and worker nationality without identifying who will own the automated production systems or receive the resulting gains.

The Core Fallacy

It assumes automation will remove undesirable foreign labor while preserving productive roles for locals. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, automation does not merely substitute for a missing workforce. Once machines and AI become cheaper and more reliable than human labor, the same logic applies to local workers wherever their labor can be automated.

The claim that employers should improve offers is only a lag defense. Higher wages may temporarily attract locals to 3D work, but they also increase the economic pressure to automate. The article treats wages as a solution when they are also an accelerant of substitution.

Most importantly, it confuses continued consumption with continued productive participation. Even if automation raises output and wages improve for some workers, the article offers no mechanism ensuring that the majority will retain access to economically necessary labor.

Hidden Assumptions

• That foreign-worker scarcity is the main driver of automation, rather than automation’s superior cost and performance.
• That automated 3D work will be replaced by equivalent local employment.
• That local workers can remain economically indispensable by demanding higher wages.
• That productivity gains will diffuse through wages instead of concentrating with owners of AI, machines, energy, and logistics.
• That physical automation remains confined to dirty, dangerous, and difficult work.
• That government encouragement can determine the distribution of value without changing ownership.
• That firms can automate production while preserving the post-WWII wage-to-consumption circuit.

Social Function

Primary classification: transition management and ideological anesthetic, with a partial truth embedded inside it.

The partial truth is that foreign-worker supply may become less reliable and that automation will be necessary for industrial continuity. The anesthetic is the promise that this transition protects local workers by removing only foreigners’ jobs. It converts a question of capital ownership into a question of worker nationality and employer generosity.

The article is also elite self-exoneration in miniature: firms are urged to modernize, workers are told to accept the right economic value, and no one is forced to confront who controls the automated surplus.

The Verdict

This is a transition memo disguised as worker protection. Automation may solve Malaysia’s labor-supply problem, but it does not solve the ownership problem. The machines can preserve production while severing the mass employment-to-consumption circuit; unless locals become owners or indispensable controllers of the automated capital, they are being prepared to consume the output of a system that no longer needs their labor.