AI in Africa might continue to increase big tech market dominance

By Caleb Onah

We are currently at a junction in the road where the African societies have to do something. Above all, a coordinated regulatory approach is needed in the above issues. Trying to smidgen the AI after the fact wouldn’t be a viable option. It might lead to an unpleasurable end.

The growing number of voices from all walks of life is raising concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, with many calling for AI regulation or at least a further pause in implementation as we ponder on how to adjust it. This includes views and reviews from different expert views –researchers and CEOs in different organisations.

AI regulation, considering the growing nature of the African economy, is a total agreement for me and I have long thought how strange it is for us not to literally regulate the use of AI and companies as well as testing on us – provided they are allowed to do so.

Initial concern is training on our data – although we do heavily and not able to manage well on biopharmaceutical testing in certain countries and I think we need to do a lot more in Nigeria to regulate what goes into the technology and AI budget and implementations. It’s not just about propaganda and job loss that many people fear, which actually may be the case but without AI regulation, we risk further cementing Big Tech’s dominance over our technology direction and sector.

Considering the most important issues that we face with the development of AI technology in the world and African in particular, of which personal options or market signals cannot solve due to African unique nature of economy and status of growth.

First, with permission to the terms and conditions agreements mean that tech companies can largely do whatever they want with our data. Whatever future society and performance AI can create, we provide the building blocks with our informants, information and data. Which is an essential input in the development – AI algorithms use our personal, health, and user data much for its development. I don’t want my personal information and user data deployed to develop new technologies with which I disagree; of which many that are thinking in this line will agree too and will create a certain level of control over these machines and Big Tech companies.

Our society and mostly the African one could easily become a dystopia one. It is important to know that models can stitch together outputs, such as human-like conversations, based on analysis on probability thereby analysing millions of actual conversations — but they cannot tell us what we mean –in context. This is according to Timnit Gebru in an article not widely circulated and the co-technical lead of Google’s ethical AI team, who with other researchers were fired in 2020.

That’s why using a platform like ChatGPT is often an interesting exercise to discover how pointless it can get us back more in a society like Africa. Using these evolved AI technologies with large data sets will only further integrate a host of common biases in human life. If AI becomes more integrated into our unattended lives, it will amplify these biases and even worse our interaction and daily life.

The second which is computational power – developing

AI requires tremendous computing energy and power. Global computing power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of Big Tech as outlined in the article “Surveillance Capitalisms: Is Technology Controlling Our Ability For Free Thinking?” with companies like Alphabet Inc./Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. dominating the cloud, which provides the digital infrastructure on which many AIs are built and will run.

This infrastructure will need to grow significantly in the future to meet the growing demand for AI, which will lead to certain environmental and climate change effects such as depletion of the Ozone layer, increased greenhouse gas emissions and energy costs already prevalent in some African countries. Furthermore, these companies, already accused of having too much power over us, will only tighten their control even further knowing this is a big market and are there for the profit and gains.

That means we won’t see the development of technologies as AI that can actually do useful things. For example, one best angle I love is to push for the enforcement action against them (Big Tech Companies), automate the investigation of large and wealthy businesses that pay less than required or evade taxes totally.

Unfortunately, Big Tech will not invest in the development of this type of AI technology or perhaps those who remain reluctant will do little. Indeed, the technologies we create often reflect the social, political, and economic contexts in which they emerge. We are currently at a junction in the road where the African societies have to do something. Above all, a coordinated regulatory approach is needed in the above issues. Trying to smidgen the AI after the fact wouldn’t be a viable option. It might lead to an unpleasurable end.

Caleb Onah is a Public Policy Analyst.