Africa And The Collaborative Growth of AI Building African Influence

Technology conferences are expanding across the African continent!! This is a beautiful and transformative opportunity for Africans access to increased technology, business resources, content creation and graphics development, just to name a few advances.

Africa is creating it’s own technological innovation, forward in the implementation, integration, application of new technologies that empower Africans across the continent. Metaverse and AI (Artificial Intelligence), VR (Virtual Reality), XR (X-tended Reality, and more are available. This is the age of growth, expansion and global engagements as never before.

AI ChatGPT or any other AI, is leveling the playing fields for Africans to empower their voices, increase collaboration on digital platforms, build digital businesses and create a new level of entrepreneurs with youth, teens, and young adults. There should be collaborations across Africa as never before in the history of the continent. Tech conferences are great the flexibility and scalability to co-exist with AI, Web 3 and the Metaverse. They, each can complement each other, strength the ability to provide resources that adapt languages,

adapting the human language to engage beyond the local with an understanding of each and the empowerment of human creativity and innovation that is human based, but digital in platforms. The process of learning to ask questions and the understanding of what is made available to develop documents for education, business contracts, coding without knowing how to code.

Coming to understanding and applying learning and developments of AI to the benefits across the continent. African educational systems should have no fear of AI systems that are fundamentally reshaping the process of content creation across the educational levels.

From the traditional education models to the integration of ICT elements, all learning is being influenced in a powerful and productive way.

The Generative AI is changing how Africans are thinking, helping business owners adapt their thinking in this age of AI brings collaboration in markets never accessible before.

Africans are learning to understand the process of AI and how human knowledge, intelligence, and comprehension can be applied to the data elements of AI.

Across human existence, the beginning of knowledge can be traced back to Mother Africa. Africa with the first universities to share the knowledge of its scholars, to encourage scholarly thinking, cognitive understanding of Science Technology Engineering Arts Math and the beginning / expanding of our solar system.

Humans are uniquely inquisitive, curious, truth seeking (in most cases), demanding of comprehension that is the basis of learning and then finding ways to apply that learning into action and engagement.

No other technologies in the past 100 years has benefited, or will benefit Africans than ChatGPT and available Artificial Intelligences.

Stated by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2018 “For more than 250 years the fundamental drivers of economic growth have been technological innovations. The most important of these are what economists call general-purpose technologies, a category that includes the steam engine, electricity, and the internal combustion engine. The most important general-purpose technology of our era is artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning.” Let’s not forget the printing press, the ability to put the words of man onto parchment, this revolutionary technology encouraged reading, comprehension, and application of what was read.

It is important to understand as well that people must decide to want to be educated, inspired and active. Technologies are made by man, inspired by solving problems and are scaled to meet the challenges and needs of the future.

Artificial Intelligence is growing in allowing educational and business entities to adapt and pivot their abilities to create dynamic content. Content will always be King and Engagement will always be Queen.

Technology is not just a web development platform, but a way to build community, democratize the web and build collaboration in technology. There are many developments from multiple facets of the Open-Source Community and with this “community” AI will be seen as a potential virus to be either eliminated or quarantined not to allow it to influence the learning and engagement processes of humans.

This must be faced with discussion, collaboration, and cooperation to integrate AI & WP. AI may be able to do phenomenal things, but it cannot create a human personality, a human condition of growth, it won’t have the same compelling personal journey as individual do that inspires, challenges, encourages trust. AI will not increase the value of technology learning it will increase the empowerment of it. AI and other technologies including The Metaverse are assistive technologies that help to move WP into the future.

I’ve found that AI ChatGPT can be very useful for brainstorming, guiding creation in writing and moving the mind forward in creativity and even innovative design. In this age of digital collaborations and cooperation the most important aspect is to make sure the mind is in control not the machine. In the article

https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/august-november-2019/

The importance and significance of AI in Africa is recognized by the United Nations and gradually globally, unfortunately colonial thinking still is strong globally about Africa and there is the reluctance from some nations to support technological and digital innovations.

Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), states that, "promoting AI in Africa is a top priority for the organization (UNESCO)."

“Artificial intelligence can help us advance more rapidly towards the achievement of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) by allowing better risk assessment, enabling more accurate forecasting and faster. knowledge sharing, by offering innovative solutions in the fields of education, health, ecology, urbanism, and the creative industries and by improving standards of living and our daily well-being.”

As the world progresses currently most AI development can be seen in North America, Europe and Asia; Africa is potentially a fertile ground of digital discovery, technological evolution and educational modifications.

The African continent has the youngest and fastest growing population on earth and to many this brings fear and apprehension. The fear is that the increasing numbers of Africans will tip the financial balances away from traditional European accesses to African influences on a global scale.

Financial resources will become available from investors and international corporations are showing interest in the continent not for environmental resources, but for the human resources of intellectual and digital developments.

My Quest To Teach is addressing accessibility by sponsoring students and teachers to attend conferences for free. Being a Media Sponsor for conferences across Africa like WordCamp Masaka and helping with youth, teen, and young adult education virtually.

Google opened its first African AI research laboratory in Accra, Ghana, to address the many economic, political and environmental challenges of that nation with wonderful results. “Africa has many challenges where the use of artificial intelligence could be beneficial, sometimes even more than in other places,” said Moustapha Cisse,

Google’s head of AI in Accra.
As Africans become increasingly connected the influences, access to content and ability to communicate globally will grow. Given the importance of technology in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, experts believe African states will soon begin to invest in the development and application of AI for the betterment of Africa across the continent.