Growing AI power pushes Africa toward uniform strategy

Agatha Egbu, a 35-year-old with a thriving law practice in Lagos, had never heard about ChatGPT until she lost a job opportunity to a generative artificial intelligence (AI).

A fellow lawyer who had relocated to the United Kingdom recently wanted her to take over five agreement matters he was handling before relocating to Birmingham, in the UK.

They had fixed a date to speak virtually so the clients could be formally handed to her, only for the meeting day to come and the fellow lawyer did not show up. He finally reached out to her three days after the botched meeting to tell her that he used ChatGPT to write the agreements as well as other processes that were pending.

“That was how the job vanished. I didn’t get it because of this thing called ChatGPT,” Egbu said.

McKinsey & Company projects that, depending upon various adoption scenarios, automation will displace between 400 and 800 million jobs by 2030, requiring as many as 375 million people to switch job categories entirely. In a continent like Africa, where countries like Nigeria have a very high unemployment rate, the implication that more job losses bring does not look very good.

Some of the big tech job cuts in recent times have been attributed to the companies’ investment in innovations like generative AI. Microsoft, for instance, which laid off 10,000 tech workers recently, is the largest investor in OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the large language model, believed to be one of the transformative AI innovations in existence. Google, which also cut 12,000 jobs recently, released its own generative AI known as Bard.

Beyond potential job losses, there is the question of what is permissible for an AI to do and what happens when a machine goes beyond its ethical boundaries.

These are questions policymakers around the world are struggling to find answers to, and Africa is not left out. The African Union High-Level Panel on Emerging Technologies (APET) and the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) convened African artificial intelligence experts at a writing workshop in Kigali, Rwanda, from February 27 to March 3, 2023, to finalise the drafting of the African Union Artificial Intelligence (AU-AI) Continental Strategy for Africa.

A statement published by NEPAD noted that to develop the continental strategy, the all-African AI experts have held several writing workshops since May 2022 in Dakar, Senegal. The experts emphasised the need for a continuous review and adaptation of the strategy to ensure it is not obsolete.

Some of the concerns that the African Union AI Continental Strategy for Africa is supposed to address included concerns regarding job losses and enhancing job creation opportunities through the integration of AI in various industries. The strategy will seek to strengthen competition laws, legal liability frameworks, and intellectual property laws, the democratisation of AI, ethical considerations, and support for AI ecosystems.

The draft strategy is expected to be submitted to AU member states for review and validation to sustain ownership. After that, a continentally adopted version shall be launched at the January 2024 AU Summit by Africa’s Heads of State and Government.

The AU-AI plan is coming at a point when there is a growing call to check the growing powers of machines and create regulatory boundaries in the emerging market.

Celestine Kezie, a lecturer at Centre for Humanities at Pan-African University (PAU), said the move is good to improve the technology in Africa.

“Imagine that about 100 years ago, blacksmiths carried placards to protest the invention of tractors and other heavy agricultural tools for fear that they will be out of their jobs as fabricators of crude agricultural implements like hoes, matchet, etc. There is no doubt that it will affect the job market but like similar experiences in the past, those in the sphere will need to up their skills and work with the new technology,” Kezie said.

The UK, on Wednesday, said it would not be creating a new regulatory body dedicated to the technology, rather it would split the responsibility for governing AI between existing regulators such as human rights, health and safety, and competition.

This is intended to avoid heavy-handed legislation that could stifle innovation and would instead take an adaptable approach to regulation based on broad principles such as safety, transparency, fairness, and accountability.

The European Union recently released a proposed legislation, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, which is primarily intended to strengthen rules around data quality, transparency, human oversight, and accountability. A main feature of the Act is a classification system that determines the level of risk an AI technology could pose to the health and safety or fundamental rights of a person. The framework includes four risk tiers: unacceptable, high, limited, and minimal.

Elon Musk and a group of AI experts and industry executives also called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4 because of the potential risks to society.

GPT-4, the latest release from OpenAI, is considered the most powerful and impressive AI model by the company. The system can pass the bar exam, solve logic puzzles, compose songs, summarise lengthy documents, and even give a recipe to use up leftovers based on a photo of your fridge. It can also spread fake news, embed dangerous ideologies, and even trick people into doing tasks on its behalf.

“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us?” the AI experts said in the letter.

For the experts, powerful AI systems should be developed only when there is an assurance that the effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.

However, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said on Thursday that things that are needed for a good artificial general intelligence (AGI) future include the technical ability to align a superintelligence, sufficient coordination among most of the leading AGI efforts, and an effective global regulatory framework including democratic governance.

The recommendation for a global regulatory framework aligns with the AU’s plan to find a unified strategy for Africa.

But many people are skeptical about the workability of a uniform strategy, given the marked differences in ideologies and worldviews of many countries and institutions. For example, Andrew Torba, the CEO of the far-right social network Gab, said recently that his company was actively developing AI tools to “uphold a Christian worldview” and fight “the censorship tools of the regime”.

Read also: ChatGPT: The new normal in technology today

Kezie said it is important to remember that nations in Africa are at different levels of development. Hence, a one-size-fits-all may not work. Africa may want to consider theoretical and praxis frameworks that are worked out in consideration of culture, developmental needs, and human flourishing.

“Techno-ethics from Africa experience is a must, lest the continent risks self-victimisation or victimisation from without. And these techno-ethics should be grounded on virtue ethics rather than the dominant consequentialist or deontological theories. The goal should be Virtue AI,” he said.

The continent body should also consider getting stakeholders including tech experts, policymakers, philosophers (ethicists and philosophical anthropologists particularly), educationists, etc. to deliberate and come up with strategies for the continent in that regard.

“Most importantly, philosophers and cultural scholars should look into our indigenous knowledge system to find the relevant frameworks they could use to domesticate the teaching and practice of the new tech in Africa, keeping in mind our cultural worldview nay our developmental need. In the end, it’s about innovating without endangering humans, value systems, and future generations,” Kezie said.