What’s the purpose for AI in Africa?
Why African government and business organizations need main brain trust for development into the future.
As technology disrupts many traditional industries and causes unprecedented workplace change, untold pains and financial losses, Africa must explore the future of work, and the impact of Artificial Intelligence (Deep Learning, Machine Learning, cognitive intelligence, predictive AI, robotics, automation and big data).
Private and public organisations in Africa can still ‘cut-through’ the noise, focus on what’s important, create solutions, align and adapt to interactive digital age and AI spread, innovate and improve services, meet the needs of this new era, exceed customers’ expectations and deliver on the future.
AI’s success – that is, to build an independent artificial brain (first independent OS) for the machine - is to experience quantum leap in advancement on what technology is already doing and can do to humanity. What AI presents surpasses any form of technological change the world had experienced. It will be impossible for many people to adapt. The transition will be too rapid. This is a development with both positive and negative consequences. Are we prepared?
Let’s catch a glimpse of current tech impact and capabilities.
The giant trees (some of the most admired organisations in the world) that have withstood raging storms of fire in decades, from global economic meltdowns to fierce competition inspired by various market forces and technological advancements, are eventually becoming susceptible and are losing their valuable leaves (employees) and other parts to different forms of technologies. While the raging fire of technology is consuming traditional industries around the world, 'creative destructors' are mutating - they seem to possess the mechanics to reproduce organically.
Just before delivery drone shows it’s prowess, organisations had mobilized all forms of technologies to cut unnecessary flows in value streams from manufacturers to consumers, eliminated unnecessary inventories and long supply chains, reorganized retail, shrank warehouses and wiped out millions of jobs.
In the Demise of Australian car making acts as a warning to rich nations, John Spoehr, director of the Industrial Transformation Institute at Flinders University painted more correctly the situation in Australia when he said “It is very rare to lose an entire industry and the demise of the auto industry in Australia is a salutary warning to other nations about what can happen if you are ambivalent about the industry, It consolidates elsewhere.” Though other reasons were sighted in the article but this was mainly due to Robotics from Asian plants.
In the digital market place, Millions of retail stores are closed worldwide due to technological inspired cultures and ever changing want of the customer. Financial institutions are not excluded from the transition. Japan's biggest banks are planning to make huge long-term cuts to their workforces (cutting about 33,000 jobs) as they increasingly turn to AI and automatons in bid to streamline operations and cut cost.
In this emerging machine learning era, some evidence you can trust is changed completely -photos and videos can be easily-faked! Computers now wield the power to generate fake news - not limited to falsified presidential address.
Far beyond job loses for affected countries- the oil and gas industry suffered heavily and plunged economies into sudden recession - the industry is still brazing itself to be beaten to pulp by electric vehicles.
Here in Africa, mobile apps from local banks, Uber and other tech start-ups are taking away the jobs of small scale business owners at the Bop.
Right now, technology is having an ever-growing impact on our lives. It’s worth noting that social media and internet possess the ability to distract human from noticing and getting a good grasp of these changes around the world. Philip Yanceyin ‘the death of reading is threatening the soul’ said modern culture presents formidable obstacles to the nurture of both spirituality and creativity, and that we’re engaged in a war, and technology wields the heavy weapons. Similarly, in one of his tweets, Lee Bezotte said “we are captive to notifications, we refuse to just sit and think, and we panic when we accidentally leave the house without our phones” In this digital age, understanding ourselves is pivotal to tackling the current tech trend.
These challenges are due to the world's current technological strength and other important factors (not meant for this article). Many have worked too hard to have some of these businesses running for decades but they now test stronger waters in the digital market place. Meanwhile, some smart entrepreneurs and Creative disruptors, also in the continent, learn their business lessons fast and can move more swiftly than the traditional organizations. They are in a click-speed importing and creating alternative solutions in the continent thereby causing the infant mortality of new start-ups before they are known or even reached their target markets.
AI’s capability
The argument that Robotics will not take jobs is not it. Infact, the impact of technology is barely showing its ugly face to the unprepared. The predictions on what robots or AI can do, will eventually do, and cannot do, is going to be another wrong economic prediction. "AI is currently employed in solving problems that require super human effort and are too expensive. “Artificial intelligence research has made rapid progress in a wide variety of domains from speech recognition and image classification to genomics and drug discovery. In many cases, these are specialist systems that leverage enormous amounts of human expertise and data. However, for some problems this human knowledge may be too expensive, too unreliable or simply unavailable. As a result, a long-standing ambition of AI research is to bypass this step, creating algorithms that achieve superhuman performance in the most challenging domains with no human input.” - Google's Deepmind.
Stuart Russell, AI researcher and expert, is creating safer robots - robots with uncertainty. This will help harness the power of super intelligent AI while also preventing the catastrophe of robotic takeover. He shared his vision for human-compatible AI that can solve problems using common sense, altruism and other human values. "If we think about some of the technologies coming down the pipeline, the ability for computers to read with understanding will happen. And when that happens, very soon after, machines will have read everything the human race has ever written. And that will enable machines, along with the ability to look further ahead than humans can, if they have access to information, they'll be able to make better decisions in the real world than we can. So is that a good thing? Well, I hope so." You can listen to him here.
When you should start to worry about AI
It always seems impossible until it's done. - Nelson Mandela
AI is exhibiting the power of untapped huge human potential. Every organisation, knowingly or unknowingly exists to serve or destroy mankind, so would AI's purposes. The cambridge University Professor, Stephen Hawking, whose doctoral thesis “Properties of Expanding Universes” free download crashed the University’s website last month shared his thoughts. "If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that improves and replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans.”
You should start worrying when AI starts programming itself. The clever insights used by machine to perform superhuman tasks are given to machines by human. AI is extremely limited in what it knows and in what it can do compared with humans and even other animals.
What purpose is Africa giving to AI?
“If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot interfere effectively . . . .we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.” Norbert Wiener (1960).
Africa! Seek a challenge if you have none. The problem with us is that we have no problem at all. African countries can take clue from Japan, UK, US, Canada, Germany, Israel, China, etc.
Joseph Quinlan, head of market and thematic strategy at Merrill Lynch/US Trust, shared an insight on Japan's challenge and the appropriate response through robotics. "Due largely to unfavourable demographics, few countries have had more obituaries written about it than Japan (a top leaders in strategic quality management). In the hierarchy of economic geriatrics, Japan stands at the apex, and for good reason. Out of a population of roughly 127m people, more than a quarter are 65 years old or older. The number of births hit the lowest level on record in 2016, which hardly bodes well for the future. Indeed, according to estimates from Japan’s health ministry, the nation’s population is on course to shrink by one-third by 2065. By then, nearly 40 per cent of the population will be 65 years plus.....- Japan's response to this challenge. Japan, simply put, is in the midst of a robotics revolution that will transform nearly every aspect of society and be replicated, in some shape or form, around the world given the ageing populations of Europe, the US and even China. Far from lagging behind, Japan is leading the way in a world confronting declining birth rates and ageing societies, and the knock-on effects of a dwindling labour force, acute labour shortages and soaring costs for elderly care."
With a ‘compounding’ technological might, US organisations are showing no limits in their venturing as to what to do or disrupt with AI and data science. The Verge reported that Waymo is first to put fully self-driving cars on US roads without a safety driver.
At Canada's Humber River Hospital, in what some are calling the first "fully digital" hospital, robots are doing everything from mixing chemotherapy drugs, delivering medical supplies, and taking radiation scans.
In Germany, Danielle Muoio reported that humanoid robots are even being designed to assist astronauts with basic tasks aboard the International Space Station.
Google’s Deepmind, that has achieved great success in the research and application of AI advancements, is a UK based company.
Toyota, an innovative leader and well-known for its quality management philosophy, is finding the best ways to transfer vehicle control between the human driver and the AI-controlled autonomous car and also developing machine learning algorithms that can learn from expert human drivers and provide coaching to novice drivers.
These are some of the most powerful organizations making meaningful technological transition in response to the digital market place and future technologies. In developed economies, you don’t need only the government to quickly understand the times, make plans and take appropriate improvement steps.
"Robotic automation, despite its benefits, is arriving at a great human cost,..What should be clear by now is that the robots are here to stay. So, rather than continue down the path of engineering our own obsolescence, now is the time to rethink how humans and robots will coexist on this planet."- Gannon
Why you should act
Yesterday, I read Patrick Aievoli’s book, ‘Veal: The Rise of Generation Interactive’. It’s an interesting read. I recommend it to all parents especially those whose children are born after the year 2000. In the book, Cox likened the current digital market place to the scenario described in Schumpeter model -“The Process of Creative Destruction,” in which he described capitalism as “the perennial gale of creative destruction,” it has become the centrepiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve. W. Michael Cox wrote “The disruption of lost jobs and shuttered businesses is immediate, while the payoff from creative destruction comes mainly in the long term. As a result, societies will always be tempted to block the process of creative destruction, implementing policies to resist economic change. Attempts to save jobs almost always backfire. Instead of going out of business, inefficient producers hang on, at a high cost to consumers or taxpayers. The tinkering short-circuits market signals that shift resources to emerging industries. It saps the incentives to introduce new products and production methods, leading to stagnation, layoffs, and bankruptcies. The ironic point of Schumpeter’s iconic phrase is this: societies that try to reap the gain of creative destruction without the pain find themselves enduring the pain but not the gain.” Visionary leaders must be agile, swift and create solutions, and develop other opportunities that replaced people can fill.
Jobs loss to automation is just started. But smart economies have taken the lead by innovating, creating other jobs and opportunities.
Are our leaders silent over AI or deciding its future without a brain trust- a detailed quality blue print, a whole system architecture? Economical predictions have proven that historical predictions can also go wrong. While historical predictions are important they could go wrong and produce pains and unimaginable sufferings and financial losses.
If government and business leaders in Africa care – questions will emerge not answers, those should be: What is AI, robotics, cognitive intelligence, deep learning, automation, big data and machine learning to us? How can we execute the creation of Robotics from the minutest details? - No reinventing the wheel! Who is working on what? Who are their partners? How can we support? What challenges can they help us tackle? What are our learning institutions doing? How do we engage tech suppliers to be sure they meet our requirements? How can we empower or upgrade our traditional learning institutions? Institutionalize these questions with visions and set up efficient processes to deliver results. It's also a battle between thinking, seeing, doing, imagination and barren imagination.
“AI is going to be a foundational technology of everything that will happen”- John Sculley, former CEO of PepsiCo.
For the African institution, the real fear is not on Robotics taking jobs but not been able to challenge the ‘holistic’ thinking (inclusive social, technical and economic considerations), that created one- and also develop one. It's not only about aids but how to organically reproduce these aids. It's not about improved technology or seedlings. It's about what's improved- what was done to improve it. How is that to AI? Africans need to be in possession and control of what it takes – its purposes for our current challenges.
Jobs, Education & Training
“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” ― John Dewey
The curriculum of many economies seem obsolete and lack the experience and tools to see or imagine the future of AI or recognize the jobs lost to technological disruption. Both private and public institutions need to competently align and adapt now to stay relevant. For Africa, technological dominance by institutions in advance nations is more than a willing pledge to a continued era of global business colonization.
“People will create the jobs of the future, not simply train for them, and technology is already central. It will undoubtedly play a greater role in the years ahead” Jonathan Grudin.
The Pew research centre mentioned some jobs AI can do equal or better than human: “Machines are eating humans’ jobs talents... dermatologists, insurance claims adjusters, lawyers, seismic testers in oil fields, sports journalists and financial reporters, crew members on guided-missile destroyers, hiring managers, psychological testers, retail salespeople, and border patrol agents....on the near horizon will crush the jobs of the millions who drive cars and trucks, analyze medical tests and data, perform middle management chores, dispense medicine, trade stocks and evaluate markets, fight on battlefields, perform government functions, and even replace those who program software – that is, the creators of algorithms.”
AI Benefits and human Creativity
People are putting the best of principles, models, thinking and intelligence into computers -from the best of strategies use to run some of the world's most admired organizations. These new AI advancements initiatives (including pursuit of a functional independent brain for the computers), will also enable organisations to embed a higher level of robotics and automation and other technologies in operations or services, respect and create truly fulfilling jobs for employees, integrate into global markets and supply chains, create stable jobs, be able to customise products for individual customers and provide world-class designs. A robust quality initiative or excellence framework is needed to benchmark management systems and tame these moving targets.
Fortunately, Professor Hawking also saw the potential benefits when he said ‘the potential benefits were great and the technological revolution could help undo some of the damage done to the natural world by industrialisation....In short, success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilisation,…But it could also be the last unless we learn how to avoid the risks.'
"Computers are going to invent the algorithms for us, essentially......Algorithms invented by computers can solve many, many problems very quickly — at least that is the hope.” Berkeley professor, Pieter Abbeel.
My take on AI Benefits and Creativity
There is not much in the news as to how Africa is catching up. This worries me greatly. We start by learning and imitating, with understanding of the truths, laws, models and principles on how things work, and then, we stand a chance, to create, improve, innovate or even invent. But the fundamentals on how things truly work is needed to advance effectively – you can’t get that out of chaos.
African organizations must use deep knowledge of principles as strategic weapon to change the AI fear into fortune. If organizations can accurately predict their social, technical and economic future they can help retrain and ‘reboot’ their staff to take up new roles in new ventures.
Organizations should not take the changes in current digital market place lightly and there is need to prepare early for easy alignment and adaptation because the transition will happen very quickly.
There is no point creating business models currently facing technological disruptions in advanced economies or repeating similar mistakes. Current tech capabilities presents entrepreneurs with opportunities to disrupt any organization not creating and delivering real ‘value to customers - ignoring the most important quality cardinal rule. Innovative product does not always translate to customer value and delight. Copied or false innovation does not mean customer satisfaction.
In point of fact, it appears that 99% of businesses lacks quality management strategy or understand the current digital trend. There is need for robust quality framework to achieve meaningful tech purpose in service.
Safer and better organisations that understand the times will take pre-eminence in the world business stage. To create, organisations need to understand completely why they are in business, this is the biggest driving force for innovation -no machine can take this from human. In this era, your chances are very slim: If you don’t know what is going on around you, and why you are in business.
In an excellent culture, competent people unleash their potentials to breathe purpose to whatever they create or do. The output of such collective ability is infinite and cannot be matched by the output of a finite machine. Create a culture where people evolve and follow-up the conscience of customers in an ever changing business world - identifying problem areas early on, or "making mistakes faster".
Which among these African countries will be leading on the huge benefits and opportunities presented to us by technology (Automation, Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, deep Learning, Machine Learning, cognitive intelligence, iBPMN, Big Data, Predictive AI) using strategic quality management? - Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Reunion Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
If organizations are uncertain about the right approach at a critical moment like this they loose what is most important in the future.
I’m curious as to know what organisations are doing to move ahead, involve people to exhibit God’s given potentials, keep customers and serve nations in Africa. Please share your story.
Francis Otolo is an organisational excellence specialist. A consultant and also leads leadership workshops to initiate excellence culture change. A research partner at OES participating the ‘first global assessment on the current state of organizational excellence’. Launched by the Organizational Excellence Technical Committee (OETC) QMD, ASQ, the research study has been endorsed by the Global Benchmarking Network (GBN) and ISO Technical Committee 176. (ISO/TC 176)
First published on LinkedIn.
