Africa needs to set its own agenda for artificial intelligence (AI), and stop following the path being mapped out by the West. That’s one of the key messages from John Kamara, founder and CEO, AI Centre of Excellence.
Speaking to ITWeb TV, Kamara said there’s a lot of noise around AI currently, but for Africa to benefit from the potential that it offers, it’s important to take time and critically assess what Africa’s needs are, independent from the drivers provided by international players.
“There's a world that is happening to us for us. But is it by us?” he asked.
“The massive opportunity that AI provides in Africa needs a critical rethink before we go too far in the rhetoric of other people, before we go too far in the rhetoric of the West,” he said.
Kamara said that instead of getting caught up in the hype, it’s important to “stop listening to what everyone's saying….and understand what is it that we would like to achieve, irrespective of what is going on, and how does that affect your wealth and your domain.”
While he focused on the importance of intent, for Kamara, his primary overarching concern is around jobs in Africa and the impact of AI on the employment prospects of the world’s fastest growing and most youthful population.
“You've seen all the unrest and everything that's happening everywhere on this continent, there’s a generation of young people who need jobs, who need hope and who need clarity on what was sold to them before – ‘if I go to school and I come out, I'll get a job’; well, that's not true anymore, and now you have to superimpose AI into that reality.”
He identified the importance of harnessing AI for education, a mindset shift from corporates to help build Africa’s economy and the importance of evolving skills to match the changing world.
On education, he said, the reform of education processes is vital. “How do we use AI as a key driver to bridge the divide in knowledge? Knowledge is the next commodity. Knowledge is the next frame of intelligence. So education is where I would love to see excellence happen, because it becomes the repository of everything that you want to do from high school to primary school to university to technical colleges, even just foundational knowledge for every African on the street, to get some foundational AI knowledge so we can allow the explosion of human intelligence to become the driver of what really helps us bridge those gaps.”
Having travelled to various African countries, Kamara gave his assessment that he’s seen “a lot of smart young people…who are doing stuff (in AI and IT),” but he calls on corporates, or ‘enterprise Africa’, to play a key role in creating opportunity and commercial viability to feed back into the economy.
“If we get enterprise Africa to buy into the opportunity, to be bullish and willing to take some risk, our startups, our ecosystem will benefit from Enterprise Africa, because then we can say ‘buy African; this young kid has made this one solution’. There's no need for them to build it, they can buy it from this kid. We can build more innovation. Instead of competing with enterprise Africa we can start matching young organisations in this space with and at least keep some of that money inhouse, but, at the same time, it means we can create jobs.”
On the impact of job displacement because of AI, Kamara acknowledges that this will happen, and said that against this backdrop, retaining jobs is as good as creating new ones. He also identified a mindset shift is needed to look for new forms of jobs that can cater to the displaced.
He gave the example of customer service jobs, which could largely be replaced with automation and AI. As there’s a lack of African data, and data is a requirement for AI to function, he suggested retraining displaced customer service employees to work in a ‘data factory’. “Because you've thought about the power of what AI needs and what it can do and then you're consistently thinking, ‘how do we keep creating jobs?’”
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