AI could lead South Africa on a path to wisdom or despair, said professor Tshilidzi Marwala.

• While AI holds
  significant potential, huge risks are attached to the technology.
• The effect the
  technology will have is currently controllable.
• South Africa is yet to
  develop an AI strategy.
• For more stories, visit
  the Tech and Trends homepage.

AI can either lead to the age of
wisdom or despair in South Africa, and the path that is taken is in South
Africa’s control.

So said Professor Tshilidzi
Marwala, the rector of the United Nations University, who was speaking on the
topic of AI at the Mapungubwe annual lecture held at the University of
Johannesburg (UJ) on 6 December.

Marwala was the former vice-chancellor
at UJ and has been a leader in discussions about AI for more than two decades.

Referencing to a quote in a
Charles Dickens novel, he said AI might send the country down a path of wisdom
or despair.

“Whether it becomes the age
of wisdom depends entirely on what we do. It depends on what we do as
individuals, as organisations, as countries and so on and so forth.”

While large language models
powered by AI represent the “new wave”, Marwala said the technology took
multiple forms.

“Artificial intelligence is nothing but a
technique to make machines think act and interact.”

While different types of AI have
huge potential to solve problems affecting humanity, he added the UN also
recognised the risk the technology could pose to privacy, bias and
discrimination, transparency, job displacement, security, and accountability.

The goal of the technology
should be to maximise the good that comes from the technology while minimising
the potential harm.

Marwala said he was part of the Fourth
Industrial Revolution commission that set out a roadmap of how to achieve this
goal in 2018.

He added while some progress had
been made on these goals, South Africa was still lagging behind other
countries.

International progress

Marwala said key questions
relating to the use of AI still needed to be answered.

“Artificial intelligence
gives us knowledge, it does not give us wisdom.

“So that step of taking
knowledge to wisdom is still a step that we need to find out how it’s going to
be done. Is it going to be done by technology? Is it going to be done by
humans?”

Currently, 67 countries have
taken strides to answer those sorts of questions as they have developed AI
strategies, he claimed.

South Africa is not one of them.

US President Joe Biden issued
an executive order in
October to put policies in place to ensure America seized the promise and
managed the risk of AI.

In the UK, an AI safety conference was hosted last
month where the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sat down to chat with Elon Musk
for almost an hour about AI policy.

Marwala said South Africa would
have to start taking similar action to avoid falling behind the rest of the
world.

“The world is now being divided
into two: the data-rich countries and the data-poor countries.” 

He added the UN had the
responsibility to bridge that data gap.

“Right now, it is clear which
part of the world is winning when it comes to this new type of AI.”

Marwala said the US and China were currently
streaks ahead of anyone else in the world in terms of AI development.