‘The economy of the later 21st century will be nothing like anything we have witnessed in the past. Lean and hyper-automation companies will define this era with major consequences for employment, inequality and cyber-based interstate and intrastate conflict,’ Professor Tshilidzi Marwala writes in his latest book Heal the World (Tracey McDonald Publishers). ‘For Africa in particular, with varying degrees of development, political dissonance, and deep fissures of inequality and inequity in its different countries, our recovery and road maps to rebuilding societies and economies are absolutely crucial.’

As an expert in artificial intelligence (AI), Professor Marwala has strong views about Africa’s role in a dynamic and rapidly changing world fuelled by technology.

On South Africa in particular, he is emphatic: ‘The complexities of the world we live in are so great that if we waste time on our own internal squabbles, we are going to miss the boat and find the world has moved on.

‘I think that we could do better. I would liken the situation in South Africa to that in Charles Dickens’s novel, A Tale of Two Cities. You can go to some parts of the country and be forgiven for thinking you are in a developed country. Similarly, you can go to others and think you are in an underdeveloped country.’

Tech companies, like most businesses, prefer a ‘developed’ environment. The global giant Amazon, which opened its first data centre in Cape Town in 2020, is a case in point: ‘Amazon is not a charity organisation. They are not going to invest a billion dollars in an area like Limpopo, where I grew up. We need to work harder to bring these worlds together. Those who are not prepared to work hard must not be in leadership positions.’

Professor Marwala’s first encounters with artificial intelligence

Marwala, the former Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg, just took up his new role as Rector of the prestigious United Nations University (UNU). He is the university’s seventh rector and the first African rector. The position carries the rank of UN Under-Secretary General.

The university, a global think tank, has 13 institutes in 12 countries, and its headquarters in Tokyo where Marwala is based. UNU’s role is to support efforts to tackle the global challenges of human development – challenges that are very much present in Africa, and Marwala is excited about the opportunity to take his experience of managing challenges in a developing country to a bigger stage. It was his time as a student in the US and UK that has shaped and expanded his world view and taught him to appreciate the ripple effect of global events on developing countries – something he believes will allow him to make a useful contribution on behalf of Africa.

Marwala’s first proper brush with AI also came about in the UK. While he was still thinking about a focus for his PhD, he met upon a fellow South African in the dining hall at Cambridge. ‘I asked what he was working on, and he said it was AI. After thinking about it, I made up my mind to focus on it too.

‘By that time, I had my Masters in mechanical engineering from the University of Pretoria, so I was already in the technological space. I realised that much of what I did as an engineering student was not too different from AI.’

The value of the human element in technology

It was in the US, he was shocked to find, that students are required to take both humanities and social sciences courses as part of mechanical engineering.

Although he thought it unusual, he added psychology, history and economics to his field of study. It taught him a valuable lesson that he has followed throughout his career. ‘If you are programming anything these days in whatever medium, you have to understand technology as well as the social sciences.’

Put simply, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is the result of humans working with machines, he says. ‘Humans and machines are becoming a single system. It is now desirable that those studying humanities and social sciences should also study technology-related subjects as part of the curriculum, and the other way around.

‘Humans have therefore become multidisciplinary creatures. When you design a smartphone, for example, you will have to enable it to hear human voices, which means that engineers involved in the process must also understand linguistics. The problems of the future are not going to be solved unless we look at them in a multidisciplinary way.’

In his own career, many of the concepts of AI had come up in courses outside his mainstream area of study, proving to him the value of these linkages. For example, he learnt reinforcement learning in his psychology class and optimisation in its complex form in economics.

During his time there, the University of Johannesburg introduced a compulsory short course on AI literacy for all its students. The two-week course ‘teaches what you can and cannot do, what the pitfalls of AI are, how it is playing out in our political and economic spaces and in our societies, and what needs to be tackled’.

Even if someone may not want to make a career of AI, he believes that this basic knowledge could be useful in whatever job they choose to do.

Africa’s progress in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

During his time as chair of the Africa Center of Excellence in Internet of Things (ACEIoT) in Rwanda, Marwala was involved in developing curricula to promote cutting-edge research in the field of IoT, training high-level professionals and academics in the subject and developing research capacity. He was also on the advisory committee of the Task Force of the Namibia Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Deputy Chair of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Presidential Committee on the Fourth Industrial Revolution in South Africa.

In other words, he is well placed to comment on Africa’s status in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. His honest verdict is not unexpected: more needs to be done to equip the continent to keep up with global trends. ‘No-one must be left behind in this march into the future. We must mobilise all our resources to make sure of it.’

Given Africa’s lack of resources to provide all aspiring students with bricks-and-mortar institutions, how can this be done? ‘We have to use digital platforms to expand virtual reality even to the most rural parts of our countries, to find a way to bring world-class teachers to these areas.’ But then, this requires devices and bandwidth and internet access, which are not always available.

‘Our economies have deindustrialised over the years and we need to rethink how we do things. We have not invested sufficiently in the technologies of production. People complain that technology is taking their jobs, but the reality is that if you don’t invest in technology and keep up, jobs will disappear even faster and even those small companies you have will disappear.

‘We need to incentivise education and economic opportunities. Let’s find out what it will take for a company to invest in improving productivity to create jobs and increase taxes. Is it tax breaks? If it is, let’s do it. Let’s think about grants for investment in human capacity development. An we must also invest in infrastructure, of course.’

One of the problems in South Africa is the quality of graduates from the schooling system coupled with a lack of technology capacity in the political class, Marwala says. If the political appointees who govern towns, regions or even the government do not understand technology, ‘they will not take you into prosperity’.

This ties in directly with the low literacy levels on the content, which makes the complex world of digital literacy a far-off dream for many Africans.

‘Literacy – as well as climate change and conflict – are our problems and our issues, and we need to tackle them. Until we eliminate them, we are far from done.’

‘We need to change mindsets,’ he says. ‘There is a great deal of work to be done.’

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