Artificial Intelligence And Africa: The Case For Investing In African Telecoms Posted on : Oct 19 - 2020

Rapid advances in technology, connectivity and telecommunications are conspiring to make Africa’s large, rapidly growing population a valuable asset for the automation revolution. It is imperative that Africa quickly develop agency in data and artificial intelligence and it will be lucrative for investors who support them by financing Africa’s telecom and data backbone.

Africa must urgently develop cogent digital strategy. This at first seems fanciful, or even superfluous, given the continent’s relative lack of more basic development. Indeed, there are myriad other challenges to which most would assign primacy. However, by setting their sights on participating in the ongoing fourth industrial revolution, developing nations in Africa may be able to chart a navigable course to rapidly raising living standards. With the window for pursuing labor led industrial development narrowing, Africa can’t afford to take a gradual approach towards rapidly matching prevailing technological standards. Several opportunities are open to Africa within the corridors of the coming age of hyperconnectivity and automation. Africa focused investors will be well served by a bold approach to the continent’s digital infrastructure.

One wonders what it must have been like to live through the bewildering gyrations of the industrial revolution. In more fanciful ruminations, one might imagine upheavals and turmoil as people try to cope with radical new technologies and abrupt discontinuation of professions, traditions and ways of life. However, the reality was far more mundane. Most people didn’t immediately realize that significant changes were underfoot. The steam engine, locomotive, electricity and even internal combustion were obscure novelties for decades before becoming sufficiently commercialized to become embedded in every day lives. It took longer still for these technologies to alter the production process enough to begin to eliminate certain jobs and alter modes of life. We tend to imagine the emergence of dominant technological innovations as the sudden bursting of a dam; the reality tends to be a steadily rising tide eventually flooding unsuspecting communities unprepared for the deluge of change.

A similar process is currently underway, with cloud computing, 5G telecommunications, machine learning and the internet of things gradually cresting our economic river banks. Today these technologies are the domain of specialist researchers and TED talks, but they are inexorably, if imperceptibly, seeping into all the seams and crevices of our everyday lives. The combination of these innovations portends a near future of widespread automation which will fundamentally reshape the global economy and are likely to reorder human societies. Sooner than most of us expect, the economic potency of highly efficient, self-directed machines will severely pressure wages and the aggregate demand for human labor. Already, machine-based intelligence has matched or eclipsed human performance in optical and speech recognition, medical diagnostics, war games and perhaps most noisily, chess. The supremacy may extend to legal drafting, investment management and architectural rendering – knowledge professions will not be exempt. Machines employing human like intelligence in narrow domains that can simultaneously execute an abundance of tasks with precise accuracy and don’t require food, breaks or weekends will create an extraordinary, and irresistible, economic asset for global producers and owners of capital. View More