Africa has a complicated relationship with technology. For the most part, the continent gets left behind, usually to only catch up years – and sometimes decades later. This is not an entirely bad thing, as it allows Africa to leapfrog the growing pains and go straight to the latest, working iteration of the be technology.
Artificial Intelligence – specifically machine learning, is a different animal though. In order for the AI algorithms to work accurately, the technology is trained on existing data sets, mostly to be found online. And because Africa is still busy catching up when it comes to online usage, the vast majority of those data sets are from users in the rest of the developed and developing world.
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Devastating Consequences If Africa Is Left Behind
And the implications are staggering, as this means Artificial Intelligence is growing and learning information that is largely devoid of African data contributions that was generated in Africa by Africans. It’s a status quo that will soon become impossible to remedy, as every day means a new tranche of data is being used to train existing AI, meaning Africa will always lag behind, which in turn could mean future AI that will be bias, ignorant or even prejudices of all things African.
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One Of The Greatest Injustices Of Our Times
It’s a greater concern than say AI plagiarism and how it is seemingly taking over some very specialised and creative tasks, like art and writing. But even that steady stream of news, seems to affect mostly creators in Europe, the USA and Asia. So the concern again is that Africa could get left behind in yet another tech revolution – probably the most significant of them all. But considering the potential of Artificial Intelligence, it could prove a lot more devastating this time around, because the progress is happening at mind-boggling speeds. Ironically, this can be seen as one of the greatest failure of a technology that initially promised to bring more equality and representation to the world.
The conversation below with the founder of the AI Expo Africa – Nick Bradshaw is a wide-ranging one focusing on Artificial Intelligence adoption across the African continent … and he says it’s not as grim as it appears at first.
