Confession – I couldn’t sleep last night…
My excitement about Artificial Intelligence is turning into worry and fear.
Like y’all know, I’m crazy about Tech. In the past 10 years, I’ve focused on localising and democratizing Emerging technologies in Africa. This is a business model where we identify and adapt emerging technologies to suit the specific needs, cultural context, regulatory requirements, and market demands of African countries.
Here are some examples of our localised technology adaptation activities in the industry:
We made Ethical Hacking a choice career in most parts of Africa – in a time when the term ‘hacking’ was linked with crime, I personally built a thriving personal brand as an Ethical Hacker and encouraged many mentees to choose the path of cybersecurity/ethical hacking.
When RaspberryPi was the big deal, we built ScratchBerryOS for the Pi and for Africa.
We were among the first to build a Bitcoin forum in Africa called Bitcoin club Africa.
We have built blockchain platforms and Cryptocurrencies.
We led the biggest campaign for Transhumanism in Africa.
We launched gemsbokGPT to localise generative AI in Nigeria.
And et cetera…
But last night, I couldn’t sleep. I was extremely worried and had to take a higher dose of a sleeping pill to shut down my brains.
The trigger was the unveiling of Samsung’s #GalaxyAI and the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg of FAIR and GenAI.
GalaxyAI is bigger than what many understand – AI has left the cloud and it’s now on-mobile – at factory default. Chew on this – imagine having a super intelligent tool on your mobile phone which you can access with or without internet connection. Let’s leave that there. AI is now finding its way into your eye glasses.
Let’s consider FAIR and GenAI – Meta’s twin Angels. Meta has one goal – reaching AGI and making it open for the world.
In a matter of months, your eye glasses will be integrated with powerful AI systems which can think, plan, advise and even act on stimuli. Yes, this is according to the head of AI research in Meta.
Here’s my worry – is Humanity prepared for this?
Do we realise that AI will shape the next decade and revolutionalize the world in a way we’ve never imagined?
And secondly, what will happen to jobs? 240,000 tech jobs have been lost so far since AI went mainstream. More will be lost this year. Are we prepared for the New Normal? I know that the UBI (universal basic income) is a solution for times like this but there’s nothing universal about UBI since the economies of different countries are also different. Some countries are poor while others are rich yet the impact of AI has no boundaries. How do we solve this?
Lastly, is Africa and African governments thinking in this direction or are we still focusing on basic politics and empty political promises of building bridges in a world led by AI agents?
My name is Charles Awuzie and we need an AFRICAN AI INDABA ASAP.
