Who Do the Thinking Machines Serve?

Dear critical reader earthlings have done something new, and we have done it without asking ourselves the first question. We have built thinking machines, and handed them to the private corporations owned by a powerful few.

That is not a complaint about machinery. It is a question about ownership, and ownership is where every argument about technology in Ghana eventually has to end up.

Consider what we already live with. For years the ordinary Ghanaian has watched state capture and rent seeking operate as though they were acts of nature rather than decisions taken by men in rooms. Contracts awarded to the connected. Licences sold to those who never intended to use them. Forests stripped, rivers poisoned, farmland sold from under families who had worked it for five generations. Each time we were told that this was development, and each time the development arrived for somebody else.

Now the thinking machine has joined that procession, and it arrives into an order that was already corrupt, not into a blank one. It does not float above our politics. It eats what our politics eats: capital, energy, water, land and attention. It is being built by companies answerable to shareholders, trained on material taken from all of us, and sold back to us at a price that includes a margin on our own stolen common sense.

So we should ask, plainly, who owns the model, who owns the data it learned from, who owns the power station that feeds it and the water that cools it, and who is paid when it works. If the answers are the same few names in California, and our part is to supply the bauxite, the lithium and the land, then we have simply been given a more sophisticated way of doing what we have done since the first rail line was laid to the mine. We will be hewers of data and drawers of electricity, and we will call it inclusion.

There is also the matter we keep postponing. A civilisation that cannot yet keep its rivers clean, cannot shut a galamsey pit, cannot pay its nurses properly or pension its police as it pensions its soldiers, is now being invited to trust its future to systems it did not build, does not understand and cannot inspect. The same leaders who cannot account for GH¢16 million can now acquire tools that write convincingly in their own voice. Observe that honestly for a moment, and the wonder of the technology shrinks to the size of the people holding it.

And all of this is happening at the precise moment when the planet most needs our attention to be elsewhere. We should be healing what we have broken: the headwaters of the Densu, the forest on the Atewa ridge, the soil washed off our hillsides into the sea. Instead we are pouring power and water into computation, and calling the smoke a cloud.

None of this is an argument for refusing the machine. Refusal is a luxury of the comfortable, and it has never kept anything out of Ghana. It is an argument for arriving with our eyes open, and with conditions.

What would those conditions look like? Ownership that is not entirely foreign, so that the value created here is taxed and kept here. Public disclosure of what data has been taken from us and how it is used. A rule that our minerals and our power are not exported cheap so that somebody else's intelligence can run. Serious investment in the people who could inspect and regulate these systems, because a regulator who cannot read the code is not a regulator. And an honest public conversation, in the newspapers and on the air, about the risk that a powerful machine in the hands of a powerful few can do what the powerful few have always done, only faster and more thoroughly.

There is nothing inevitable about any of it. The road we are on was chosen by people, and roads chosen by people can be chosen differently by people.

A word to the wise, then, to those who govern us and to those who write and preach in this country: the thinking machine is here, and it is not going to wait while we finish arguing about whose turn it is to be chairman. Decide whose interests it serves, or it will decide for itself, and we will not be in the room when it does.