John Thornhill\u2019s recent article in the Financial Times, \u2018Humans cannot remain passengers in the back of the AGI car\u2019, has stayed with me because of what it suggests about where artificial intelligence may be taking the world and what countries such as Nigeria might find waiting for them when the technology becomes much more powerful.\n<\/p>\n
Thornhill is looking beyond the arrival of another generation of better software. He is troubled by the growing belief that artificial general intelligence is inevitable and that society will simply have to adjust to whatever the people developing it eventually produce. Once that attitude takes hold, people can start treating decisions about the technology as though there is little left for governments, citizens and institutions to decide.\n<\/p>\n
AGI remains uncertain. Nobody knows when it will arrive or whether the more ambitious claims made about it will prove realistic. Even the meaning of AGI is still disputed. Yet enormous amounts of money are being invested in systems expected to become increasingly capable of learning, reasoning and performing a wide range of cognitive tasks with less human direction.\n<\/p>\n
Some of the first people likely to feel its effects may be young Nigerians entering the labour market. The early years of a career are often pretty ordinary. A young lawyer researches cases and prepares documents before being trusted with more complicated work. A young accountant checks figures and learns how a company operates. A software developer begins with smaller assignments. A journalist spends years learning how to find information, check facts and understand the workings of an organisation. The routine work is part of the education.<\/p>\n
If machines become capable of doing much of it, employers may have less reason to recruit large numbers of beginners. The graduate may still be qualified, intelligent and hardworking. There may simply be fewer opportunities through which he acquires the experience he needs to become a professional.\n<\/p>\n
Nigeria has spent years talking about the size and potential of its young population. A large young population can become an economic advantage when people are productively employed and businesses can absorb them. Without enough productive work, population growth puts more pressure on everything from household incomes to public services.\n<\/p>\n
This has consequences beyond the domestic labour market because Nigeria has also looked to knowledge-based services as an area in which its young, educated population can compete internationally. Countries such as India built huge industries around supplying skilled labour to businesses in richer economies. Nigeria\u2019s participation is much smaller, but the attraction is familiar. A company abroad can employ Nigerian programmers, accountants, researchers, customer-service workers and other professionals without bringing them physically into its country. The attraction has always been that the work can be done elsewhere for less.<\/p>\n
AI changes that arithmetic if machines can eventually perform a substantial part of the work being outsourced. A company in London or New York that once needed a large team to carry out routine research, coding, customer support or administrative work may eventually need fewer people. The Nigerian worker may remain perfectly capable. The employer may simply have less work for him to do.\n<\/p>\n
The technology is already moving beyond people working behind computers. The development of what has been called physical intelligence is pushing AI into machines that can move, manipulate objects and perform increasingly complicated tasks. China\u2019s rapid progress in robotics offers one indication of where the technology could go. If intelligent machines become more capable in factories, warehouses, transport and other physical settings, countries still trying to create large numbers of industrial and service jobs will have another calculation to make.\n<\/p>\n
Nobody knows how quickly that will happen. It may take much longer than some of the current enthusiasm suggests. The line between artificial intelligence and physical work is becoming less clear.\n<\/p>\n
Nigeria has long operated within digital systems whose most important components are controlled elsewhere. Foreign software, cloud services, hardware and digital platforms are already part of everyday economic life. There is nothing unusual about a developing country using technology developed abroad. The problem becomes more serious when those systems begin to perform functions that sit close to the heart of economic and public decision-making.\n<\/p>\n
Consider a Nigerian bank whose operations become heavily dependent on an AI system controlled by a company outside the country. The bank depends on continued access to the system and on the commercial terms set by its owner. If the company changes its pricing or restricts access to the system, the bank could face higher costs or disruption. A serious error could also affect its customers.\n<\/p>\n
A government agency relying heavily on an overseas AI platform would face similar questions about data, reliability, accountability and access.\n<\/p>\n
Thornhill\u2019s concern about fatalistic inevitability comes down to power. If increasingly powerful AI is treated as something that will happen anyway, the companies developing it acquire an enormous advantage.<\/p>\n
Their decisions can begin to look like technical developments rather than choices that should be open to political and public scrutiny. <\/p>\n
Nigeria will have little influence over the laboratories where the most advanced systems are developed or over the enormous amounts of capital being committed to them. It can still have a say in how those systems enter the Nigerian economy and under what conditions they are used.\n<\/p>\n
The countries and companies developing the most powerful AI systems will have a strong voice in setting the standards under which those systems are used. Rules covering safety, data, intellectual property, access to computing and the responsibilities of AI companies will increasingly affect countries that did not develop the underlying technology.\n<\/p>\n
Developing countries could end up adopting standards developed elsewhere because their businesses need access to foreign AI systems. They could accept commercial conditions because alternatives are limited. They could depend on foreign infrastructure while having little influence over the companies controlling it.\n<\/p>\n
That pattern is already familiar in other parts of the global economy. AI could make the dependence deeper because it reaches into the knowledge and decision-making functions of the economy itself.\n<\/p>\n
Nigeria has begun putting some of the necessary pieces in place. Its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy sets out ambitions around research, infrastructure, talent and responsible AI adoption, while the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics is working on research, development and the adoption of AI and other emerging technologies.\n<\/p>\n
Universities need to produce people capable of understanding and questioning the technology, while researchers need access to serious computing capacity. Regulators will need enough technical knowledge to understand what they are buying and regulating, and public institutions will need reliable digital infrastructure and data. Nigeria has substantial gaps in these areas.<\/p>\n
The country does not have to build the world\u2019s most powerful AI system. But it needs enough capacity to understand what it is buying, negotiate with the companies supplying it and develop alternatives where dependence becomes too risky.\n<\/p>\n
The benefits are real. A small Nigerian business can already use AI to perform work that once required more staff. Researchers can process large amounts of material much faster. Government agencies could eventually reduce some of the administrative burden that consumes limited manpower.\n<\/p>\n
The people building these systems will make choices about how they work and how they are used. The data used to train them, the assumptions built into their design and the standards applied to their operation will not emerge from nowhere. A Nigerian user may be interacting with a system whose understanding of Nigerian circumstances is limited by decisions made thousands of miles away. That does not make foreign technology inherently bad. It makes local capacity more valuable.\n<\/p>\n
Culture, law and public administration could face similar problems. A country that has little presence in the development of advanced AI may eventually discover that systems used extensively by its citizens understand its economy and society largely through somebody else\u2019s data and assumptions.\n<\/p>\n
The state does not need to control every AI company or attempt to manufacture every piece of technology locally. It, however, needs to know where dependence could become dangerous, where regulation is required and where investment in domestic capacity would improve the country\u2019s bargaining position.\n<\/p>\n
Nigeria has encountered this problem before in different forms. Major changes in the global economy have often reached the country as developments to which it must respond rather than opportunities it helped shape. By the time the consequences become clear, the strongest positions have usually been taken by others. Artificial general intelligence could make that weakness more obvious.\n<\/p>\n
Nobody can say with confidence what AGI will look like or when it will arrive. Countries such as Nigeria can live with that uncertainty. The decisions being made now about research, investment, computing infrastructure, regulation, education and ownership will shape the environment in which such countries encounter whatever comes next.<\/p>\n
The car is moving. Nigeria can remain in the back seat and leave the driving to others, or build enough capacity to have some say in where it goes.\n<\/p>\n
Ladigbolu, a journalist, writes from Lagos\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Thornhill\u2019s recent article in the Financial Times, \u2018Humans cannot remain passengers in the back of the AGI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6744,3013,25,545,849,70441,14222,40721,50247],"class_list":["post-143176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agi","tag-agi","tag-artificial-general-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-digital-transformation","tag-future-of-work","tag-nigeria-economy","tag-outsourcing","tag-technology-policy","tag-youth-employment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}