ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A Narrative of Innovation and Intrigue

We all know incredible stories of how artificial intelligence (AI) is bridging barriers and enabling things that seemed impossible only a few years ago. This does not make it any less scary, as we grapple with questions around job security and the future of doing business. Fact is, whether we like it or not, the technological revolution is happening. Today AI can do things like detecting illnesses by smelling a human’s breath, or identifying gas leaks through the same skill of smell. AI can do something called “machine vision”, where machines are able to “see” the world and analyse what they “see”. This machine vision is used in self-driving cars, facial recognition for police work and predictive maintenance in manufacturing.

While we consider what these technological advancements mean for us as a society, we are made aware of some truths that have been with us since the dawn of the internet. One being that content you share online does not belong to you. As the saying goes, if you are not paying for the product, you are the product, and currently we are not paying for much of our online technology. This is why privacy has become the new luxury in our data-saturated economy.

This does not sit well with content creators as they ask if their online intellectual property still belongs to them. Late last year the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of their content in ChatGPT. A key concern when it comes to AI and content creation is the question around copyright. If AI creates a song, who owns the rights to that song? Additionally, if AI generates content that infringes on trademarks or copyright, who do we hold liable and how?

Still, we cannot ignore that AI is here to stay, and as such we need to adapt to a world alongside AI. Robotschool is the first Namibian “robotics hardware and software school for kids of the future”. Founder of Robotschool, Bjorn Wiedow, says, “Our take on artificial intelligence in education is that it has the potential to enhance personalised learning, adapt to each child’s pace and provide real-time feedback. It can foster critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving skills from an early age. AI can transform education into a dynamic, engaging experience tailored to each child’s unique needs, fostering lifelong learning. If children don’t learn AI or any other technology, they may struggle to adapt and learn future technologies.” Wiedow also shares a staggering statistic: “According to the World Economic Forum, over half of the world’s young people will end up in jobs that haven’t been created yet.”

According to the World Economic Forum, over half of the world’s young people will end up in jobs that haven’t been created yet.

While we consider these and other factors around a future that is upon us, we need to address our universal fears about AI, the most common being: will AI turn against us? Writing for Big Think, Allan Dafoe, associate professor at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, explains, “If we govern AI well, there’s likely to be substantial advances in medicine, transportation, helping to reduce global poverty and [it will] help us address climate change. The problem is if we don’t govern it well, it will also produce these negative externalities in society. Social media may make us more lonely, self-driving cars may cause congestion, autonomous weapons could cause risks of flash escalations and war or other kinds of military instability. So the first layer is to address these unintended consequences of the advances in AI that are emerging. Then there’s this bigger challenge facing the governance of AI, which is really the question of where do we want to go?”

I had a few conversations with Namibians who are using AI to make their work life easier. One of them, videographer Sky Ilifa, will blow you away with the things he can do today when editing videos with the help of AI. Things that would have taken specialised skills in the past, can now be done in mere minutes. However, as a student, he feels that if we hand over all our content creation work to software like ChatGPT we will lose the ability to think critically in the long run, as it is in the process of our own research and verification that we fully learn and understand information. These are skills that Robotschool’s Bjorn Wiedow says are learnt through coding and robotics. So perhaps while the future may look very different from the present we know, the solutions lie alongside the problems ahead.

It is highly unlikely that malicious intent will cause AI to turn against humanity. However, AI systems can cause harm if they are not designed and managed responsibly. The future of AI is largely up to us – either by putting pressure on the developers or becoming the developers.

Kirsty Watermeyer