Artificial Intelligence is currently in the mouth and mind of everyone but will Africa benefit from the shift in this new information age, I consider artificial intelligence to be a phase in the Information age as was the internet age which was ushered in by the dotcom era.
The question of who is leading in the field requires further interrogation, what is clear is that this very big part of the communication revolution and is a component of an industrial revolution, it is those who possess the other requirements of an industrial revolution who will heavily benefit from advances in Artificial intelligence.
Jeremy Rifkin in his book The Third Industrial Revolution points out that for an industrial revolution to occur, a nation must make advances in three key technologies, which technologies must converge at a particular period in time. The technologies are Energy, Transportation, and Communication, to which I will add Agriculture.
A Nation must make reasonable advances in each of the three yet have them influence and depend on each other functionally, an example is energy powering the transportation system and communication system. An extreme advance in one technology without the other would not make one claim to be in an industrial revolution.
Many have mentioned how the world is currently in the 4th industrial revolution, principal among them being the World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, but this is a misunderstanding, extreme advances in communication technology have easily been mistaken for entrance into the 4th industrial revolution and the United States of America’s advances in key communication technologies in the past has been mistaken for the 3rd industrial revolution even though the country did not make major advances in transforming its source of energy and transportation.
This is to say that the US transport and energy technologies have not been improved in the last 100 years since the commercialization of refined hydrocarbons by John D Rockefeller and the automobile by Henry Ford. On the other hand, massive advances in Communication technology have been achieved, this does not mean being in an industrial revolution.
China has made huge advances in the 3 key technologies responsible for the Industrial Revolution, it has had remarkable achievements in adopting and switching to renewable energy more than the whole world combined, adopted electrified transport in High-speed trains and electric vehicles more than the whole world combined again! it has made remarkable advances under Huawei in communication technology and is still pushing the envelope of Semiconductor manufacturing with Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Shanghai) Corporation (SMIC) even though it may not be the leader in this area.
For Africa, for artificial intelligence as a technology to make sense, we must urgently invest in all the other foundational technologies; the modernization of our transport systems and infrastructure such as building a continental railway platform upon which a communication platform will be attached by laying a fiber optic cable along the railway line, we must move fast in adopting the use of gas as a form of energy while utilizing our oil resources moderately, our investment in communication technology companies like search engines, cloud technology companies and others must be fast-tracked to avoid over-reliance on western communication platforms. If this is done with enough urgency, we would have made worthy advances as an African civilization.
Artificial intelligence is only going to benefit those who already possess the key infrastructure in place, as mentioned; transportation, energy systems manufacturing, and modernized agriculture. A mere enjoyment of the periphery benefits doesn’t mean we are part of the revolution itself.
We therefore get up and move very fast in this generation.
Reference:
THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, Jeremy Rifkin.
Kwame Gonza is a PanAfrican member of the African Continental Unity Party, a Mechanical Engineer, a geopolitical analyst, and the architect of the African Railway Triangle Network Master Plan.
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