Last month, the first of a series of hearings by the US Senate on Artificial Intelligence (AI) kicked off. During this hearing, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, made an appeal to members of Congress under oath: regulate AI.
Around the same time, Geoffrey Hinton — who is famously known as the Godfather of AI — quit his job at Google to speak freely about the dangers of AI.
Mr Altman and Dr Hinton’s remarks made headlines — and made sense. But they are far from the first people to make this argument. For years, public interest technologists have loudly noted that AI technology is the most world-changing tech of our time.
And that its development and deployment is swift and sometimes harmful, which makes its regulation a necessity. Scholars like Dr Timnit Gebru, Sofiya Noble, and Abebe Birhane have conducted deep research into how AI systems and the datasets that train them can be biased and discriminatory — especially against people of colour and populations across the Global Majority.
As a public interest technologist, I’m an avid supporter of the work done by doctors Gebru, Noble, and Birhane. And as an African technologist, I fully comprehend their warnings about who AI harms affect the most.
Indeed, I am apprehensive that African nations are not ready to leverage this technology. According to recent research by The Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa (CSEA), the AI readiness of a nation is based on: level of maturity of a nation's technology sector; a country’s data and infrastructure capacity; and a government's ability to regulate and support the development of AI.
Kenya ranked third in the 2022 Government AI Readiness Index report, but the sub-Saharan region’s average score was 29.38 — and the lowest globally. In fact, most African countries were at the lower end of the ranking spectrum.
This is alarming given how quickly AI harms are manifesting in society. Consider just the issue of disinformation: Fake news websites and news channels are mushrooming at an alarming rate, and the use of deep fakes is on the rise.
The world recently woke up to viral pictures of Pope Francis wearing a white puffer jacket. Netizens globally were excited by the viral pictures only to later discover they were AI-generated by a 31-year-old construction worker using popular AI image-generating app, Midjourney. This example had low stakes. But what if the creator had decided to generate a violent or polarising image, instead — like a Kenyan political leader holding a sign with an offensive slogan?
While western governments debate how to regulate AI technology, African governments must also collaborate and develop regulatory frameworks around AI that protect against harms and address our unique African needs.
This work won’t just protect against harm — it will also allow the Africa to reap the benefits of trustworthy AI. Even though there are negative impacts of AI, we cannot ignore the positive contributions across many sectors. Healthcare, manufacturing, marketing, retail, robotics, logistics and security industries are some of the biggest beneficiaries of AI advancements.
In the healthcare sector specifically, we have witnessed a transformative approach to cancer care and treatment through precision medicine.
Using a patient's genetic and socio-environmental information, oncologists can now prescribe treatment therapies that work best for them, saving money and significantly increasing the chance of survival for patients. Cementing this technology across the African continent in a responsible way can save millions of lives.
Also consider AI in the automotive sector: With the recent adoption of advanced driver-assistance systems, road safety has reached a new level as drivers are assisted with self-steering vehicles that detect pedestrians and monitor blindspots.
The global need to regulate AI technology is undisputed. African policymakers must step up at this key moment to craft, pass, and enforce common-sense laws — laws that make AI more transparent and accountable. As this world-changing technology further takes root, Africans deserve the best possible version.
Ms Siminyu is an AI Researcher who has focused on Natural Language Processing for African Languages. She works at Mozilla Foundation as a Machine Learning Fellow based in Kenya.
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