The Director of Research and Innovation at the Africa Sustainable Energy Centre (ASEC) has advised experts to overcome fears about artificial intelligence (AI) taking over jobs, and to explore how the technology can be used to create opportunities that help grow economies, especially in the informal sector.

Speaking during the AI for Africa Workshop explained that AI, over the past few years, has demonstrated it has the potential to make knowledge accessible to everyone, educated or not, which has increased fears of AI.

However, he noted that this provides Africa with the opportunity to provide real solutions with the help of AI to aid people in villages and rural areas, especially those who are limited from using technology or AI.

“The informal sector in Africa is very large, and we realise that connectivity is an issue…So, one thing is that as AI experts, as most of us are, we could look at how we could start compressing some of these AI ideas to start working offline, right?”

“So we could have AI for farmers, an AI app for farmers, where it’s on their phone, that they could communicate with them while they are on the farm without connectivity. We could have an AI app that helps farmers even detect whether they have the diseases in their plants and all that without connectivity,” Dr Twumasi explained.

The ASEC Director noted that Africa typically waits for other continents to develop new technologies and then becomes a consumer of these products. However, there are many educated Africans today who are skilled in developing new technologies with AI.

He stated that this leaves Africa at a critical point where AI could be important to the continent’s growth when taken advantage of.

“And there are various technologies that are coming up that we have the capacity to quantise some of these ideas and do this edge compression and all that, and put them on phones that could be used even remotely.”

“We have seen that, even in other countries in Africa, starting up with new ideas in terms of trying to get AI to places where we lack connectivity. So I believe that we have opportunities that we could look at in the infrastructure end and in the connectivity side, trying to resolve all the various issues, so that we could develop as Africans,” he added.