But the real question we should be asking is whether the world could and should actually retain some inefficiencies, rather than the relentless pursuit of efficiency and more efficiency that may tip the scale and lead us all into confusion. There will certainly not come any day in the future where human beings will not have to lift a finger because robots have fixed all the problems. Artificial Intelligence will not be able to do every work – even though it will try hard.
The history of governments and businesses in this world could be validly summed up as the pursuit of efficiency. A good government is an efficient government that does the most with the littlest public resources and delivers the most value to citizens. Of course, achieving this level of perfection is impossible but governments around the world are giving it a shot, while being put under pressure by citizens for the highest levels of transparency, efficiency, frugality, value-for-money. For companies, shareholders want the highest returns, and even today, with the development of management theories, and the transition to the stakeholder paradigm, companies try to achieve an intricate mix of efficiency between their obligation to shareholders and other stakeholders.
The history of discoveries, inventions and innovations, the world over, is totally about how to achieve more efficiency. I was discussing inverter air-conditioning with a knowledgeable friend recently, and he lectured me on how the old A/C compressors had pistons inside them, which worked the same way as car engine pistons. But someone thought about how the same cooling could be achieved with less force than before. My friend explained how air-conditioning systems have become intelligent lately, slowing down when they achieve a level of cooling, and starting to work a little harder when the room temperature rises. This is in just one tiny corner of human existence. We must commend those who have done the research that makes our lives a little more liveable. Whether it is innovation in health systems, medicine, engineering, agriculture, housing, travel, and indeed everywhere, the truth is that humanity now lives a lot better than we did a hundred years ago.
The pursuit of comfort is endless, and smart innovators target systems that deliver more comfort to humanity. A machine is anything that allows human beings to use less effort to achieve the same results. I actually got this definition from a fictional engineering genius in an Indian movie. The movie is titled Three Idiots, and the genius is Chatur Ramalingam (Aamir Khan), standing up to the authoritarian Mr Virus (Viru Sahastrabuddhe), the director of the Imperial College of Engineering (ICE). It is known as one of the greatest Indian movies made and it won several awards. Now, we could discuss the politics of how much African people have contributed to these innovations that make live more liveable. This is not the focus of this article. African professionals and research may have suffered suppression, but the largest room in the world is the room for improvement. The bottom line is that everyone values a little more comfort, ease, efficiency, durability, speed, portability and other such conveniences. One could even argue that Nigerians overdo the pursuit of these conveniences, which they obtain for cash at whatever prices – the latest phones, gadgets, cars, even private jets. It is important to consider the sustainability of our tastes, our practices, our financial choices.
This is where the brutal efficiency of AI comes in.
AI has been developed to:
- Make work and the workplace more efficient;
- Save time required for human beings to think – and thus maximise efficiency, especially in workplaces;
- Shorten the time for creativity to the barest minimum – nanoseconds. And this could be an office document, a complex drawing, an artistic rendition, music, movies, etc.;
- Help maximise relaxation and entertainment for human beings;
- Demystify logistics and supply chains;
- Among others.
This is what I can surmise so far about the AI phenomenon. I have been learning a lot more about it and have obtained certifications in Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT under the Coursiv platform, while continuing another eight-week learning on AI and Business Analytics at Cambridge University, online. In time, billions of people in the world will learn how to get more incredibly efficient using AI. People talk about an AI Bubble – in the event that too much hype and money has gone into its development everywhere. Well, that could be a possibility, but for now, this is evidently a skill that all professionals must acquire. With the ‘cheap’ Coursiv programme, I can now prompt AI to create images, short clips, and even music. This is apart from being able to use AI platforms to generate documents or perform analysis of documents, including comparisons among documents. And I am still quite a novice.
Now, in the last few months, the top tech companies in the world have been laying off hundreds of thousands of workers. And one thing they cite in those often-brusque letters of diengagement is glibly – ‘AI-Efficiency’. What that means simply is that the owners of those companies – Google, Meta, Oracle, Amazon, and many more have realised that with the way AI has continued to make their operations more efficient and profitable, they see no reason why they should continue to pay expensive workers. Coders, graphic artists, analysts, researchers, coordinators, even management cadre staff now have their heads on the chopping board. For an executive or business owner who has mastered a bit of AI, he starts to look at staff differently, thinking “why do I have to continue paying this person to do for a month what AI can achieve in minutes?” And since we live in a world of capitalistic totalitarianism, this is likely to continue and even spread to smaller companies across all sectors, including governments.
The scarier outcome is what will happen to jobs around the world. With the tech companies having teed off the mass layoff of workers due to AI-efficiency, will other companies and organisations also start this shortly? Should governments, for example, just keep hordes of people on the job when they will do absolutely nothing if AI were allowed to step in? Researchers have suggested that there will come a time when as a result of AI efficiency, there will be no jobs for anyone to do anymore.
The average worker has never been more vulnerable, and easy to waste. Certainly, AI is the fourth, or fifth industrial revolution, that will have nearly the same effect on the world as electricity or the internet did. Another light bulb moment in everybody’s head. Remember the days when research meant climbing ladders to retrieve huge volumes that only geniuses could make sense of? Later, just an enquiry on Google could solve most of the problem. Today, not only could AI help you assess hundreds of already digitised works of dead geniuses, but it will also present its results to you in ready-to-use fashion. In seconds. This is work that you may have had to deploy a battalion of geniuses to do just a few years ago – and they would have cost you huge amounts of money and time – to achieve a fraction of the efficiency, time and accuracy.
One of the worries around this AI phenomenon is whether the ability for human beings to think independently will be reduced to dangerous levels. And this is real. Imagine the ability for fresh graduates to go through the painful crucible of real reading and endless nights of research? With AI, will fresh graduates’ transit to a situation where they simply sit back, type a few prompts for AI to do the work, and then fade away into the sunset to live their lives like retirees? Or will we all learn more from the tons of AI research that we all read daily – because AI is able to distill knowledge for the whole world in seconds? Will our minds expand, rather than shrink? Will we all become better creators of new work as a result of the ability to leverage on AI? These are also possibilities. Perhaps there are things we don’t know, which we need today that AI will enable some of us to create for the rest of the world. Fingers are crossed.
The scarier outcome is what will happen to jobs around the world. With the tech companies having teed off the mass layoff of workers due to AI-efficiency, will other companies and organisations also start this shortly? Should governments, for example, just keep hordes of people on the job when they will do absolutely nothing if AI were allowed to step in? Researchers have suggested that there will come a time when as a result of AI efficiency, there will be no jobs for anyone to do anymore. And so, global leaders should consider the idea of a Universal Basic Income, which will be an amount that every adult or family will get monthly, even though no one has to put in work to earn this. I have thought about and I don’t believe we will ever get to that point. For one, AI cannot do manual labour. AI cannot fix our plumbing or engage in masonry. Someone has to get up off their butts and actually do these jobs. What is easy for AI to do are the desk jobs, analytical stuff, or graphics, research, music making, while piggybacking on already existent work and systems. Even moviemaking depends on sampling already existent work and knowledge (acquired with traditional, manual efforts) in the industry.
Therefore, one of the criticisms of AI is that it has sampled other peoples’ age-long contents without paying for what it took – and it keeps taking. Even for a quick research, AI references many people’s work, including interviews or even original posts on social media. AI has the ability to reference and sample anyone’s work – and to displace everyone in a new world, without paying for what it took.
Perhaps the most paranoid folks around this AI thing are the large conglomerates themselves. Everyone at that level seems to be building their own proprietary AI, which they can control, and these companies have blocked their internal systems against other AI platforms. So, staff cannot use any other AI platform apart from the sanctioned company-owned one (even if it isn’t as robust of what is available out there. A major reason for this paranoia may be that these companies are not about to allow roving generic AI to access their systems and lift proprietary assets and information.
I say that a country like Nigeria still has some good advantages, even as mass unemployment looms all over the world. We have huge employment opportunities, especially in areas where AI may not be able to function. Nigeria, as well as most developing nations, have very low public service manning levels compared to developed nations. While Nigeria has about 3 per cent of workers working for government at all levels, countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark have an average of 30 per cent.
Just as African nations are a little late in getting on most innovation, so also will we need some time to tap the most from this new innovation. Even Europe is said not to be on board with its own AI, and countries like France and UK are now reacting by deliberately reducing their dependence on the Americans, especially in terms of payment systems and social media platforms – which also use data acquired from people that are repackaged and sold back to them at exorbitant prices. For now, the global AI race has been left to the Americans and the Chinese. The rest of us are to buy the products of their innovations. AI could even be considered to be a thief of data that you leave around or don’t protect adequately. It steals and transforms the data into what you will have to purchase from it. Who knows what other strategic advantage it could create for itself tomorrow.
I say that a country like Nigeria still has some good advantages, even as mass unemployment looms all over the world. We have huge employment opportunities, especially in areas where AI may not be able to function. Nigeria, as well as most developing nations, have very low public service manning levels compared to developed nations. While Nigeria has about 3 per cent of workers working for government at all levels, countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark have an average of 30 per cent. Even the UK has 17 per cent and the US 13 per cent. I continue to opine and suggest that we have huge spaces for employment in our security, educational, health, social services and environmental sectors. This is because AI will not take the place of teachers in our rural areas, where electricity is still a luxury, and we still need a physical touch at that level.
AI cannot replace all our nurses just yet. Therefore, we still need more nurses and doctors. What is more? AI cannot replace the roles of social service workers that are yet to be created. Our local governments should be pressured to look at this critical subsector (social services). We shouldn’t have so many children roaming the streets, out of school. We shouldn’t leave our physically challenged to beg for money on the streets, or our old people to be vulnerable to the elements. And we shouldn’t leave the mentally challenged to lumber rubbish all over our urban places. We also have to stop living in filth and environmental degradation of all types. And AI cannot solve that problem for us. We have an opportunity here to engage millions in employment, while the world deals with the serious consequences of a system let loose. We must know ourselves, and our estates in life as a people.
Nota Bene: This is not an AI-generated article. One skill that one may acquire in studying AI, is the ability to easily detect an AI-generated work (even though people are learning and AI too, about how to obliterate the footprints of AI and to make AI-written work undetectable, even by software that have been created to do just that. At the end, perhaps we will compare the past prowess of someone sending in a report with the robustness of the report they are sending in. If a non-starter sends in an amazing analysis, be sure AI has a hand in the work. If someone who cannot write a single correct paragraph suddenly becomes a Shakespeare, be sure he has got some assistance from AI.
But the real question we should be asking is whether the world could and should actually retain some inefficiencies, rather than the relentless pursuit of efficiency and more efficiency that may tip the scale and lead us all into confusion. There will certainly not come any day in the future where human beings will not have to lift a finger because robots have fixed all the problems. Artificial Intelligence will not be able to do every work – even though it will try hard. Maybe the issues with the world are not really about efficiency. Maybe we have to look deeper at humanity and stop looking for the next hit, the next fix, like an efficiency junkie!
‘Tope Fasua is the special adviser to the President on Economic Matters.
