By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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In May 2017, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published a report titled The Future of Jobs and Skills in Africa: Preparing the Region for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, urging that, “As one of the youngest populations in the world, it is imperative that adequate investments are made in education and learning that holds value in the labour market and prepares citizens for the world of tomorrow.”

On the disruption of the job market by new technology, the report noted that, “While it is predicted that 41 percent of all work activities in South Africa are susceptible to automation, as are 44 percent in Ethiopia, 46 percent in Nigeria and 52 percent in Kenya; this is likely moderated by comparatively low labour costs and offset by new job creation.

Despite this longer window of opportunity, the region’s capacity to adapt to further job disruption is a concern, although there are important nuances at the country level.

As is the wont, the report didn’t make noise in Africa. A social media post on it elicited incredulous laughter.

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Even the WEF at that time could see the dramatic leap of artificial intelligence (AI) of the last, otherwise, it would have been shy about projecting that job losses from automation would likely be cushioned by Africa’s low labour costs and offset by new job creation.

By that time, under the media headlines, early-stage AI had already stealthily crept on the continent.

In South Africa, word in the technology community was that Massey Ferguson was trialling driverless tractors around the country, all controlled from a hub in the commercial capital Johannesburg.

In Malawi, a giant global agricultural biotechnology corporation was even more adventurous, working quietly with selected farmers and using AI-souped tractors that analysed the soil, decided how deep the hoe would dig, the number of seeds, and the amount of manure to sprinkle — all in one swoop in real time.

In Kenya’s Rift Valley, tea companies introduced plucking and harvesting machines. That didn’t end well. Many of them have been burnt in worker unrest in recent times.

Automation also came to Ethiopia in a big way, though not where it was expected. The federal government in Addis Ababa deployed drones with deadly effect against Tigray rebels, blunting their advance on the capital in late 2021, and ultimately winning the bloody for it.

It was the largest deployment of drones in a war in Africa and one of the biggest in the world. The world watched and learned, and everyone was off to the frontline with their drones.

Read: OBBO: Why you will love and fear these East African lands

While artificial intelligence technology has been around for some time in consumer electronics, smartphones, home devices, websites, everything was turned upside down in 2022, when OpenAI unleashed its chatbot, ChatGPT. In a week, it had over one million users and became the fastest-growing consumer app in history. A flood of generative AI tools followed, and they were being thrown at everything from new medicines to art.

US chipmaker Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) were used to train that ChatGPT. That now seems like the Stone Age. ChatGPT has come a very long way in the past two years, and shares in Nvidia have soared by nearly 277 percent over the past 12 months, closing above a $2 trillion market cap on March 1. It has just released a processor that is 30 times faster.

Swedish fintech company Klarna Bank AB, just released an AI assistant that does the job of 700 customer service agents.
How afraid — or excited — should East Africa be? ChatGPT had an immediate effect on the region’s leading tech market, Kenya.

Last year, American media reported that AI was taking the jobs of the thousands of Kenyans who work in a shadowy, but lucrative for young people industry — writing essays for US college students.

Kenya is a major hub for the contract cheating industry, where freelancers help American students write essays and handle classwork. Now the American children have ChatGPT and others to cheat for them.

The big break in East Africa will need us to understand that AI ultimately is not about technology, but how we think about the place of human beings in it, and in our region will likely come from unlikely places.

AI, first and foremost, is philosophically anti-anthropocentric — our deeply held view that humankind (and its intelligence) is the central or most important element of existence. There’s some good in it. To that, we will return in future.

To name just one case; one of the successful conservation stories in East Africa today is around the recovery of elephant herds, which a few years ago were in peril. Part of the success has come from tracking them as they roam, done through tagging. We might want to consider giving East Africans elephant-inspired tags in a massive AI-tech push so they can cross borders freely through any official border point or panya route. It wouldn’t matter, really, would it?

The leading consumer of semiconductors in East Africa is a Kenyan company doing very interesting things, but that few have heard of. Part of the reason is that it is based in rural Kenya away from the prying eyes of the media and nosy social media warriors.

If you have your ear to the East African ground, this time it seems the big break AI will come, as the Kenyan street would say, from oshago (village).

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. X@cobbo3