I am a big fan of technology. Over the past year, I have been fascinated by the disruptive effect of some Silicon Valley companies. The primary example is Uber. Taxi drivers in New York, London, Paris and now Johannesburg have been up in arms over the threat to their livelihoods. Once you have used the service, you realise there is absolutely no reason for the old metered taxi model to exist. Uber is cheaper, faster, safer and more convenient. This is all great news for me as a customer.

Or it was. Until a friend pointed out accounting could be next.

You can imagine how alarming this notion is; the possibility that in the near future an engineer at Google could write a piece of code that could take my job. Like those taxi drivers in Paris, I would have to resort to protesting on the streets against what everyone else considers to be progress. All those gruelling hours of university study rendered obsolete in the blink of an eye. After all, the software will be cheaper, faster, arguably safer, and more convenient.

My distress lasted until the next time I laid my eyes on my copy of the IFRS books. I realised there is one big hurdle in the computer’s way: the sheer amount of professional judgement included in the standards.

When people think of accounting, they think of debits and credits. Until you go through a SAICA accredited university degree. At some point you will realise that, as important as the numbers are, they are not everything. A typical example is when you spend 30 minutes in an exam addressing whether something fits the asset definition. That is just the conceptual framework, never mind the more complicated standards.

Maybe someday there will be true artificial intelligence that can interpret the accounting standards. For now, however, it remains in the realm of science fiction. I watched a TED talk by Google CEO Larry Page where he showcased a computer programme learning to play a basic computer game. This is the kind of game a 3 year old human could easily learn, yet it is an impressive achievement for a Silicon Valley tech giant.

Another example is Google’s new Photos app. It has rightly been receiving praise for its impressive features, among them image recognition. A tech journalist I follow searched for ‘wombat’ when he was previewing it, and the app duly returned images of wombats from a trip to Australia he had taken about a decade ago. The app has also been in the news for tagging a black couple in the USA as ‘gorillas’.

If the latest and greatest software cannot tell the difference between humans and animals, can we expect it to figure out IFRS13-Fair Value Measurement anytime soon?

Leonard Mundida

Junior Trainee Accountant, Johannesburg