TL;DR
The article advocates for a proactive approach to AI in Africa, emphasising the need to build ecosystems and infrastructure to sustain innovation and avoid being left behind in the global AI race. It also raises important questions about the potential impact of AI on the continent and calls for a critical examination of the macroeconomic implications of AI for Africa.
Mini Prologue
For those who live under a rock and have not already known, Artificial Intelligence is the new big thing. It is a great time to be alive, or maybe not a very great time if you work in the creative and knowledge economy. AI’s impact on the job market is uncertain and the breakneck speed of progress that we are witnessing is definitely not helping our innate desire for certainty.
Let’s play a Lemfon game. I will show you a tweet and its author’s reply days after, and you will try to guess what may have changed. If you lose - and I pray to God you are an honest and graceful loser - you will send me an email offering coffee. Should Fortuna smile on you and guide you to the right answer, I will send you an email offering coffee. The only caveat is that if you lose, you send me the first email of our exchange, and if you win, I send you the first email of our exchange.
Here is the tweet and its reply (Remember the rules of our game!).
Did you get it? I hope not. Please be honest and send me that email.
Of the many things that happened between February 12th and 15th of this year, we have Valentine’s day, and OpenAI’s release of Sora, its new text-to-video AI model.
Like var_epsilon (author of the tweet above), most of us are realising that AI is here to stay, with huge impacts on the skills we learn and the careers we pursue.
Back to business
A couple of months ago, I participated in an AI Roundtable Discussion that brought together students from two leading African Universities to “discuss how AI can be used to address some of Africa’s most pressing issues, how it can address inclusion, and how the continent might address some of its risks.” It was such a productive discussion, and I learnt immensely from the exchange.
We established by means of debate that AI will improve the state of healthcare in Africa, improve our ability to forecast and mitigate the risks of natural disasters, make education more accessible, improve creativity, create opportunities for young Africans to upskill themselves, and empower businesses.
As I am often the listener at these types of events (I have the eternal curse of assuming that whatever I have to say is obvious and someone will eventually say it, or waiting to develop a fifty-page thesis in my head before I speak), I had some time to daydream and think to myself. It occurred to me that although we were asking ourselves relevant questions, there was an arguably more relevant question that we were missing.
Will AI improve the lives of Africans? Will there be risks against which we must be prepared? What are those risks? Questions like these are definitely useful. Yet in that moment, I felt that there was a bigger question that we should be trying to ask ourselves, one whose answer was less certain and whose exploration alone could be impactful. My thinking was, as is now, rooted in the idea that the AI revolution we are witnessing is a golden opportunity for Africa to leapfrog the traditional stages of economic development and realise something akin to a green transition.
What should we be doing to ensure that AI improves our lives as Africans vis-a-vis the rest of the world, that we leverage AI to restructure global economic dynamics and improve Africa’s standing in the world?
Let us be clear; AI will very likely improve our lives as Africans. We may get drugs for diseases we currently consider terminal, we may find cheaper alternatives to drugs that are currently unaffordable for large swaths of the population, education may become more curated for personal learning experiences, and more people will be empowered with tools that allow them to innovate. Let us be clear; AI will likely improve the lives of everyone. The point I am trying to make by re-writing my paragraph sentence (in a respectful nod to my English Language teacher) is that these considerations are applicable globally and do not necessarily improve Africa’s standing in the world.
Besides providing economists with voluminous primary material to study bubbles and the madness of crowds, the world that resulted from the Web 2.0 craze and the dot.com bubbles reminded us that our high school economics teacher was not wasting their time by teaching us about comparative advantage. It goes without saying that certain African improvements in healthcare, education, business empowerment, natural disaster risk management, job creation and even governmenance can be directly linked to Web 2.0. However, we must ask ourselves, how Africa has (or could have) leveraged Web 2.0 to improve its standing in the world by leveraging comparative advantage and identify which of the associated lessons we want to incorporate into our embrace of the AI revolution that is unfolding before our eyes.
My view of technology and business in general is that the supreme business goal is the creation of comparative advantages that last into perpetuity. I think that in the short-term, most businesses chase competitive advantages - they want to foster as many factors as they can that allow them to produce goods or services better or more cheaply than their rivals. But in the long-term, the superior businesses chase comparative advantages - they want to create situations that allow them to to produce goods and services at a lower opportunity cost than their rivals. In the short term, businesses compete over ideas, in the long term, they compete over ecosystems and infrastructure.
Let us come back to Web 2.0 and technology in general and see things through the lens of comparative advantage. I am willing to bet with 80% certainty that we can find an engineer in every country that can build a search engine and a social media platform (two hallmarks of Web 2.0). Should they really try to do it? I will leave you to think about that. That is what happens when comparative advantages are created; we may know the what and how, but the opportunity cost of doing even the things that are clearly profitable becomes so high that we would rather do something else. As concerns Web 2.0, I think that we have understood the what and how, but the why questions elude us. Consequently, we have been unable to be major players in the global Web 2.0 economy.
Why comparative advantage? Simply put, we need to be the go-to people for something that the world needs and is willing to bargain for. Every new technology wave is an opportunity to be go-to people, and we need to participate in the quest for dominance when the big players have not already from zero to one. When the search for innovative ideas is as fragmented as the AI industry currently is, it is a big sign that there is an opportunity for an obvious winner to emerge and command a premium. We need to be positioning ourselves to be a potential candidate for the obvious winner title.
The pursuit of an AI comparative advantage also increases the likelihood that we measure up with the rest of the world, get invited (with all due respect and consideration) into the rooms that matter, and take our destiny into our hands. Have you ever wondered why the UN security council does not have every country in the world? Why is there a G7, G20, but not a G193? In a parallel, crazy world, getting nuclear weapons will get you some invitations. But this is the real world, and the only way to get invitations that neither annoy anyone nor diminish your soft power is to play the economic game nicely.
If Africa does not move very quickly to improve our infrastructure and ecosystem, and participate in the current “gold rush” that we are witnessing in the AI industry, we will be giving up a golden chance to create a comparative advantage that improves our standing in the world. If we do nothing, and by that I mean being indifferent to AI, I am still willing to bet that globalisation will bring “AI inspired” products to us and improve our lives. If we are going to do anything, we might as well do the things that increase the likelihood that we gain a comparative advantage from this gold rush. I hope that if you disagree with everything I say going forward, you will at least take this as a point of reflection.
But how do we position ourselves for such an advantage? I do not have all the right answers.
I think, however, that we must think critically about our educational systems, review incentives to attract world-class researchers (and entice African scientists living abroad to return to the continent), and invest heavily in research and technology infrastructure.
We have to revamp our educational system to encourage more critical thinking and personal initiative; we need to be churning our first-principle thinkers and doers, not certified graduates. If we succeed in creating such a culture of independent inquiry and tinkering that the public starts debating the value of universities and formal education, we may have won! That is not going to be a result of any quick fix, and will require the involvement of stakeholders at all levels of the education pyramid. This is not a problem we can simply solve by importing top global universities to Africa as doing so will only allow the bad habits learned at lower levels to trickle upwards, further devaluing education. Given that learning compounds, isn’t it better to play the long game by starting at the lower levels?
For so many Africans doing research work abroad, coming back to the continent is not a feasible option - it is normal and justifiably ethical, to be patriotic and concerned about our countries, and at the same time to seek career growth and advancement and make decisions based on the promise of the latter. We have hard working Africans who are facing the tough choice of pursuing an academic career in foreign universities where there is a clear path to a tenured position and funding for their work is available, and the prospects of returning to a university in their home countries where the chances of enjoying the benefits of a strong ecosystem are much lower and the hustle for funding is exacerbated by corruption. In the same way that we are trying to make our countries attractive to persons seeking impact and social good, we must endeavour to also make these countries attractive to people seeking career advancement. This also means putting our money where our mouths are, investing heavily in research (and actually ensuring that we are not enriching some corrupt “academics”), technology infrastructure, as well as creating the necessary conditions for businesses to accommodate and nurture the talent we produce.
Before I get hit with the argument about solving poverty first, consider that if we effectively execute the two recommendations above, we will attract significant foreign direct investment and create more value overall. Additionally, the idea that there is a sequential order in which we should be solving world problems is not sustainable in the real world. The world is a complex system for which observed problems have more than a simple, isolatable cause. It may not be such a bad idea to fight the wars that we so badly want to win on more than one front.
When I first shared these views with a friend, I was accused of zero-sum thinking. The countering opinion was, my comparative advantage idea was likely to drive Africa into a wasteful winner-takes-all battle in an industry that was burning through enormous amounts of cash. For that, I think we must think more broadly about the costs and possible outcomes. It appears to me that the obvious costs of pursuing a strategy to create an African comparative advantage in the AI industry is the allocation of resources away from things that could arguably be more important. But what are the benefits? And more specifically, what are the benefits that are independent of the outcome of such a pursuit of comparative advantage? If we overhaul our educational systems, make our countries more attractive to foreign talent and citizens in the diaspora who want to return, invest more in research and associated industries, can we really lose? We will have laid a solid foundation that empowers almost every sector and leaves us to catch the next wave of opportunity whatever it will be! To me, pursuing a comparative AI is not so much a goal in itself as it is an inspiring label to stick to all the justifiable reforms that are long overdue and good for us with or without AI. Think of a gentleman whose life is a mess, he is lazy, not driven, lives in disorder, doesn’t get invited to the cool parties and pities himself. He chances upon an adorable lady, and suddenly realises that he must change his life to woo her. After fixing his life; getting a job, learning to work hard, keeping himself neat and presentable, keeping his house in order and becoming the person everyone wants to meet at the parties, if his chance-princess rejects him, has he lost? I think he won!
A second concern I see arising is the idea that innovation is abundant, and that we will eventually get to bite this giant cake everyone else seems to be eating. My disagreement with this line of thought is founded in my idea that ecosystems and infrastructure - as the sustaining force of businesses - are more important than brilliant ideas. It is not always the most brilliant idea that wins, it is the one that survives. If we do not build the ecosystems and infrastructure, how do we expect to sustain those brilliant ideas when (if) we eventually get them? If I were to reword the famous adage, “genius is evenly distributed, opportunity is not”, to fit this context, I will say that innovation is evenly distributed, systems that sustain innovation are not. I don’t know that innovation is evenly distributed, but I hope the rewording conveys the point. It is our responsibility to build the systems that sustain innovation. The AI revolution that is unfolding before our eyes, and the mass fear and uncertainty that it is engendering (everyone wants to know which new skill to learn and what ChatGPT will do to their jobs) is our golden opportunity to unite behind a common objective.
Another very related point of opposition is that some countries, in Asia to be specific, took advantage of a wave to build a comparative advantage in an overlooked industry; everyone left manufacturing for services and the knowledge economy and Asia took a successful shot. I wonder if we should be trying to pull an “Asian” strategy with AI, because AI is not here to affect economies in compartments; it is here to pervade economies and could potentially reinforce inequalities by exponential factors. We wait at the risk of being either wiped out or potentially at the mercy of those who did not wait.
The only opposition I will gracefully fall to is that Africa is not a country. And trust me, this is not an attempt to promote Pan-Africanism. I chose to write about Africa as one because I believe that to a large extent, we face the same fate if we elect a passive approach to AI.
The point I have been labouring at is that there is a serious macroeconomic aspect to consider when discussing the effect AI will have on our lives as Africans, and that we must get to work to ensure that the ensuing skew in global economic power does not leave us in a significantly bad position. I do not pretend to know all the right answers, and I believe no one does. I hope, however, that we think more about questions like these when we discuss the impact of AI on Africa.*
*NB: In the spirit of debate, I will be flabbergasted if someone chooses to write a counter argument to the views presented in this article. Please contact me if you want to be that person, and I will post your response as a guest post with all due recognition.