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On one of my social media tours exploring Facebook content one afternoon, I came across an article by Professor Fred McBagonluri, President of Academic City University, confirming accreditation and deployment of the BSc. Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the establishment.
Seeing this post got me excited and within minutes, I shared the good news on my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.
I have seen positive comments and likes from the AI fraternity in Ghana and abroad. Indeed, I could sense the enthusiasm of the people and how excited they were to see this progress and move in the right direction.
As I continued to read the comments and respond to personal messages from supporters, I began to wonder again, “My beloved country, Ghana, is it ready for this?”
Do we have the necessary laboratories to facilitate the introduction of a new program outside of our traditional programs? Therefore, I decided to write this article to spark the conversation about AI.
Let me first explain what I think AI is; artificial from the Oxford dictionary means created by man, while intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge and skills. Therefore, by coining these two terms, AI simply means the ability to impart artificial knowledge or skills to a machine or computer. Essentially, computers can solve abstract tasks for humans with such ease.
A good case example is the defeat of Garry Kasparov by IBM’s Deep Blue chess system in 1997. As a rule, humans acquire a lot of information about the world in a subjective and intuitive way, which is. difficult to explain in a more formal way. Thus, one of the major difficulties of artificial intelligence is knowing how to transfer this unstructured knowledge into a machine.
Even so, we have all been in contact with solutions deployed by AI in our daily lives at some point. These range from using Google Maps and navigating through unfamiliar destinations to social media sending you recommended items based on items you’ve purchased or viewed previously.
Recently, Open-AI, a San Francisco-based company, launched its new technological language model which is capable of producing human-like text, answering questions, completing codes and also summarizing long texts. .
Additionally, Apple Inc. uses AI in almost every feature of the iPhone. Its facial recognition systems allow users to add additional security features and these are all developed using computer vision models (a subdomain of AI). Facebook, Google, and Snapchat also use these computer vision architectures to help identify photos of people and then tag the photos with the name.
The Covid-19 pandemic has also led to the development of new uses of AI systems in healthcare. Systems used for tracking, tracing and screening of Covid-19 patients have been implemented, which has greatly helped countries manage the pandemic. Research by two IBM researchers strongly suggests that the use of AI could reduce the number and time spent conducting clinical trials by more than 70%.
The above examples again highlight the role AI plays in our lives and how much more transformation and satisfaction it could bring. Nonetheless, a survey by Smith and Anderson sought the views of 1,896 experts on whether AI will displace more jobs than it creates by 2025.
They found that 48% of those experts believed that AI would displace more jobs than it created by 2025, while the remaining 52% believed that it would not displace more jobs than it created by 2025. ‘she would not create. I agree with the latter and believe that AI will create more jobs. Humans must be prepared for the future for this possible revolution.
The dawn of the Industrial Revolution created new jobs through human ingenuity and the AI revolution in the 4th Industrial Revolution will be no different. Malone et al. recently suggested that AI would allow new industries to emerge, creating more jobs. This has already been proven by the demand for AI skills measured by the growing number of published job vacancies (Alekseeva et al., 2020)
In this regard, it is crucial that educational institutions, government and industry actors collaborate effectively to pursue the AI agenda for Ghana’s socio-economic development. To achieve this, it is necessary to ensure that the next generation is well prepared and ready to take on the new jobs that will be created through AI.
The introduction of BSc AI by Academic City University is absolutely a step in the right direction and I am confident that many higher education institutions across the country will take inspiration from this novelty. I am a strong supporter of the values and mission of Academic City University. It’s not just because I teach at the university, but rather because the university trains students in a unique way that allows students to not only become consumers of theoretical knowledge but also practitioners of what is happening. ‘they learn.
We need more institutions of this nature if we are to reap the benefits of AI.
Subsequently, recent advancements in the field have brought extraordinary capabilities to AI that can replace human decisions at critical points such as loan approval systems, hiring, bailouts, and more. However, AI systems learn patterns from historical data and are then able to make decisions in the future. As such, historical data has an important role in determining potential candidates hired in the future.
But what if the historical data itself is biased? Developed AI systems will only further amplify the bias in the data. There has been recent news that indicates how AI systems have discriminated against people based on their gender, race or ethnicity. Researchers have proposed not using sensitive attributes to train AI models. Regardless of this shortcoming, this does not completely eliminate the problem of bias, as AI systems could still find proxies for sensitive attributes.
That is, a person’s postal code could be used as an indicator of a person’s ethnicity or race (Tal Z, 2014). Amazon developed a recruiting tool that was found to be biased against women and eliminated all CVs belonging to women (Hamilton, 2018). Additionally, Prison Offender Management for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) profiling, which has also been used in the United States to help judges make pre-trial interim release decisions, has been proven biased against blacks (Larson et al., 2016).
All of these questions therefore lead us to stress that while we welcome the potential benefits that AI can bring to us as a country, special attention needs to be paid to ensuring that these developed AI systems are fair and impartial. In doing so, there is a call to action for all parties; AI engineers, academic institutions, governments, etc.
First we need to recognize and admit that bias in AI is indeed a huge problem that needs to be addressed. Subsequently, part of AI bias issues arise from training data. AI systems should not be built using data that is available at low cost without appropriate consultants investigating the source of the data, how the data was collected, etc.
Important questions must be raised and thorough investigation carried out before any data is used in the development of AI systems. Amegadzie et al., 2021 throw more details on how to leverage the use of AI for the betterment of good citizens of Ghana.
This implies that the government and other non-governmental organizations should invest part of their resources in appropriate and acceptable data collection procedures. In addition, governments can use different verification and auditing tools to assess the risks and impacts of any AI tool ready for deployment to ensure that it complies with AI ethical guidelines.
Universities will also need to introduce AI ethics courses as part of their AI curriculum. This will ensure that students are well informed of the ethical implications of any system developed. If all of these measures are put in place, we can be sure that the next generation of AI engineers and developers will reap all the many benefits of this emerging technology and not use it as a tool of mass destruction that affects people. marginalized groups.
The author, Deborah D Kanubala, is a lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science at Academic City University College.
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