Africa & Artificial Intelligence: 'For AI to work, people need to understand it'
A new book titled 'African Artificial Intelligence: Discovering Africa's AI Identity' outlines strategies for harnessing AI to solve Africa's problems from an African perspective.
Picture: Facebook@Mark Nasila
Sara-Jayne Makwala King interviewed 'African Artificial Intelligence: Discovering Africa's AI Identity' author, Dr Mark Nasila.
Listen to their conversation in the audio clip below.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) deals with enabling systems, processes or machines to execute human intelligence.
"AI is re-imaging or disrupting every single industry."
- Mark Nasila, Author - 'African Artificial Intelligence: Discovering Africa's AI Identity'
"AI is changing what the meaning of life is."
- Mark Nasila, Author - 'African Artificial Intelligence: Discovering Africa's AI Identity'
"If you look at Africa's approach to adopting technology, we've always fallen behind. We end up not grabbing our potential opportunity."
- Mark Nasila, Author - 'African Artificial Intelligence: Discovering Africa's AI Identity'
A new book titled 'African Artificial Intelligence: Discovering Africa's AI Identity' outlines strategies for harnessing AI to solve Africa's problems from an African perspective.
"The book is about strategising...to ensure that we drive accountability and make decisions across various industries and ensure that we successfully identify opportunities and implement them in the context of the African setting as well as dealing with the ethical issues that we deal with in Africa."
- Mark Nasila, Author - 'African Artificial Intelligence: Discovering Africa's AI Identity'
Nasila believes that AI has the potential to redefine sectors like education, healthcare, and urban planning immensely.
"The key major challenge with AI is that for you to make it work for you, you need to build it under the context of the problems you're solving or the types of industries you're trying to build. We can not afford to just take AI that is out there and apply it to our context."
- Mark Nasila, Author - 'African Artificial Intelligence: Discovering Africa's AI Identity'
"African governments must be aware that we don't have much resources to make mistakes. We don't have big economies to make mistakes in adopting technology...For us to minimise mistakes, the first thing is to craft strategies that articulate what we want AI to do for us...How do we bring all the countries along through literacy processes so we can build citizens of AI and data science. For AI to work, people need to understand AI."
- Mark Nasila, Author - 'African Artificial Intelligence: Discovering Africa's AI Identity'
He stresses that achieving successful implementation necessitates more than just enthusiasm - it demands a deep understanding, strategic planning, and ethical considerations.
Scroll up to listen to the full interview.