Digital is the way to save our skin

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”—Buckminster Fuller.

While you were distracted by news of a garbage preacher allegedly luring dozens of his followers to starve themselves, something of importance happened in Nairobi.

The governor, Mr Johnson Sakaja, he of the dimples, signed an agreement with Mozilla Foundation to promote digital innovation in the capital city.

Nairobi County government staff will get some training, as will 5,000 young people, in computing and software engineering skills. A centre of excellence offering training in artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain will be established and there is to be a Nairobi Tech Week. Great news.

Why is this otherwise innocuous grip-and-grin sort of media event so great? We are not innovative at an age when innovation is an existential issue. We are used to thinking of disruption as a workplace thing; we imagine only implements, products and equipment can become obsolete. 

But it is increasingly becoming evident that social systems, countries, and nations can become uncompetitive, and regressive, thus unable to support vibrant and rewarding life, eventually losing the battle for existence.

This generation bears a heavy burden of change but Kenya is moving in the wrong direction. There was a time a university mess was like a five-star hotel with first-class food and riots when meatballs were removed from the menu. Many children of peasants first tasted custard, cereals, sausages and bacon here.

The average university is close to a slum with the student body living a horrible existence in filthy insecure private accommodation and immersed in the type of vice that would make John Kiriamiti blush. Not all though.

There was a time we could build many of our own roads and housing estates. Today, if you need a footpath, you call the Chinese. I’m exaggerating, of course. 

We are like a shipwrecked man who is 10 metres underwater. The others have struck off towards the shore but we have to swim to the surface to follow. In higher education, not only do we have to create an exciting and conducive environment for learning but clean up the universities, build and equip enough proper lecture halls and modern labs and ensure there is sufficient and adequate student housing.

Different cultures

When I watch videos on Instagram, I’m struck by what they tell me about different cultures. India was a poor country 30 years ago; it is the sixth-biggest economy by GDP, bigger than France, Italy, Canada, Australia and those traditionally wealthy countries. Indians are good at process improvement. They bring efficiency and productivity to even the most menial of jobs—a person serving hundreds of chickens in the street or making gigantic chapatis.

I am amazed at the huge array of tools and implements the Chinese make, from simple irrigation systems to incredible automation. They are industrious and fanatically focused and composed.

They are manufacturers and makers of things. They may have copied stuff but are capable of improving and manufacturing it. Arabs are barbecue-mad; they love meat and huge feasts with everyone sitting on the floor and eating with their hands. 

From Africa, I see hundreds of beautiful women showing off clothes and flashy lifestyles. I see folks gyrating to Amapiano in South Africa or wriggling their fat rears in Tanzania. This is not to say there are no amazing breakthroughs here; there are. But they aren’t our way of life yet. Our way of life is slaying, gyrating and wriggling.

Of course, the Nairobi digital innovation, while welcome, is not as ambitious. Were I the governor I’d set the standard that no learner within my jurisdiction graduates, whether from kindergarten or university, without going through a fundamental digital education, to ensure that in five years the county would be one of the most digitally progressive populations in the world. 

And opportunities would pour in. Today, China is the world leader in AI. The application of autonomous systems has the potential to create massive efficiencies and large improvements in productivity. Even at the household level, a peasant farmer can use such a system to feed and medicate farm animals and run things such as irrigation at a fraction of the normal cost.

The first function we should hand over to computers is procurement. A system like ChatGPT can identify stock is running out, find the best quality at the lowest price and organise the buying, paying and delivery logistics instantaneously. A computer has perfect integrity; you couldn’t bribe it.

If humanity continues making a mess of things, it will be disrupted by AI. I started reading Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics and I was struck by what a mess the world is: In 2015, the richest one per cent owned more than the rest of the 99 per cent combined, one in nine people don’t have enough to eat, we are heating up the planet furiously, 40 per cent of our soils are useless, in three years two out of every three people will live in a water-stressed environment and by 2050 there’ll be more plastic rubbish than fish in oceans.

Kitawaramba.

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