As Artificial Intelligence gains traction in Nigeria, tech expert, Olumide Balogun, has urged the Federal Government to put in place a regulatory framework to guide its deployment and usage in the country. Balogun, who is the Google West Africa Director, noted that more people were indicating interest in AI. He said the technology was not as dangerous as some view it to be.
According to him, AI is like any other technology in that it can be used for good or bad, depending on the user. “On the one hand, it has incredible potential to be used in ways that are beneficial for society – whether it is protecting people from spam and fraud, translating hundreds more languages, or forecasting floods up to seven days in advance.
But it can also be used to amplify current societal issues – like misinformation and discrimination,” he started on a media chat with New Telegraph. He added: “It’s really important that we get these tools right, working together to ensure we’re creating and using them responsibly. That means governments introducing regulations to help us seize the benefits of AI while mitigating the risks, as well as companies developing shared sets of standards and principles.
At Google, we’re also led by our own AI Principles – which you can read online – to make sure we’re developing AI that is beneficial for society.” Speaking on whether AI is a threat to human jobs, the tech expert said: “As technology has developed, so too has the job mar- ket. At the beginning of the last century, people mostly worked in agriculture.
Now we have hedge fund managers, cabin crews aboard widely accessible commercial flights, and as recently as 1995, web designers. So we’ve had these questions for a long time and, as a society, we’ve navigated them well. “That’s not to underestimate the potential of AI which is essentially the ‘third wave’ of digital technology after the internet and mobile phones. “It will be brilliant for people’s productivity and for economic opportunity but, it will also cause some levels of disruption.
We’ll see a whole set of jobs that can grow but, the most profound change will be how many of our jobs will be assisted by technologies.” He stated that the new search trends released by Google had indicated that search interest in AI had reached an all-time high in Nigeria. The trends, according to him, show that people have searched for AI more than ever in 2023 so far, with interest rising 310 per cent since last year, and by 1,660 per cent in the last five years.
According to Balogun, “AI models are trained and created by human engineers, who input data into the AI system to train it. For example, in 2012, we showed an AI model thousands of videos of cats on YouTube, so that it could learn to recognize a cat. Now, with advancements in technology, we could give an AI model hundreds of books on animals to read – and, using those, it would be able to describe a cat to us on its own despite having never been shown one.
“Once AI systems are trained, they’re tested to see if they work well. You can do this by asking the AI model to describe or recognise a cat, for example, or even to generate a picture of one for you. Training AI models can take a long time – but once they work, they can be deployed into production so that you can use them at home.”
He noted that AI technology had been in existence for a long time but has become popular recently. He said AI could be traced back to the early 1950s when Alan Turing, a British mathematician, published a paper on “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” “That kick-started the principles behind AI – but the first time anyone used the term was likely in 1956 when John Mccarthy hosted a conference at Dartmouth College called the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in Artificial Intelligence.
“So AI is not new – in fact, AI research has been accelerating since the 1990s. Google itself became an AI-first company back in 2015. But the pace of AI development is accelerating – with more households able to access generative AI tools like text-to-image generators or chatbots – which has made AI a household phrase for maybe the first time ever,” he added.