Rather than viewing artificial intelligence as an existential threat, African countries can use its benefits to bolster education and employment. It holds prowess and promise for the future workforce, say experts in education.

David Sokefun co-founded Codar Tech Africa in Lagos, Nigeria, in December 2021 realizing that tech training was inadequate in Africa’s biggest economy. With the swiftly-changing job market because of advancements in generative AI, he knew the importance and urgency of teaching tech skills that would set people apart in an AI-influenced landscape.

“An adage rings true – in the 21st century, illiteracy pertains to those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn,” Sokefun says. “History attests to the fate of companies that failed to adapt during the internet era, as well as those that successfully navigated the shift.”

Sokefun’s will to build a company that learns to work with AI is perfectly timed. Open AI’s ChatGPT has redefined the boundaries of what artificial intelligence can do. Whether it’s writing a complex code or a poem, generating a travel itinerary for the summer holidays, or learning a new language, the chatbot doesn’t hesitate to help you within seconds. Unsurprisingly, it attracted over one million users within five days of its launch, and OpenAI is currently valued at about $29 billion.

The staggering progress of ChatGPT has led many to fear for their jobs. Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, resigned from Google, citing concerns over the likelihood of AI to upend the job market. In an open letter, many technology leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk, urged AI labs to pause the development of the most advanced systems, stating, “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources.”

Their concerns can’t be dismissed. Goldman Sachs estimates AI can impact 300 million full-time jobs. International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) expects AI to replace 7,800 jobs within the company. With the powerful technology eating up massive industries, there’s no denying the worldwide trend will impact African livelihoods, too, as discussed in this year’s Future of Education (FoE) summit in July hosted by CNBC Africa.

Many speakers brought up AI rapidly changing the job market during various enlightening discussions in the virtual summit. The lack of tech training provided to students and employees forged an expanding skills gap in Africa, leading many to remain jobless.

“There is a huge number of graduate students who are unemployable because they lack the skills that create this wide mismatch,” Dr Marwa Haddar, Vice-President of Finance and Strategy of Blue Monsoon Capital, an integrated financial services company, said in a panel discussion at FoE. “They spend long years studying at universities or 12 years of curricula. And then they are with degrees that have really no market value locally or regionally or not to say at the global level.”

Augmented automation

Other panelists focused more specifically on augmented automation brought about by ChatGPT.

“Things that you can write – scripts, collating information – that’s something that ChatGPT does much better than any of us could do,” Barry Vorster, Director of BDO South Africa, a group of accounting firms, said at the summit. “So there is a piece where if you’re an excellent editor, there’s still a job. But there’s less of them.”

AI’s ability to take peoples’ jobs can threaten several industries, even pushing them to the brink of extinction.

“The reality is that many companies take a very short-sighted, immediate-term view on the situation and believe that AI can replace humans at their jobs, which equates to increased savings and profits,” Professor Grace Leung of the University of Johannesburg says. “We are already seeing how Hollywood and other companies are foregoing human labor and handing over work to AI to complete.”

For many African countries, AI-threatening jobs come at a time when unemployment levels continue to rise. About half of all people under 34 are without jobs in South Africa. Unemployment in North Africa is projected to be 11.2%, which is above pre-pandemic levels.

“Many African countries have a high dependency on a few sectors, such as agriculture or commodities, and with limited economic diversification, alternate employment options are scarce,” says Dr Angela Lusigi, UNDP Resident Representative in Ghana. “The skills mismatch in the labor market, informal sector with its unpredictability, and lack of protections for the vulnerable coupled with political instability have contributed to the rise in unemployment rates in Africa.”

Impact on the future of work

Despite the predictions of doom, history offers enough reasons to be optimistic about new technology and its impact on the future of work. Jobs have been destroyed throughout various centuries, but new, previously inconceivable career paths have forged their way. For most of the 20th century, typing was viewed as a desired job, and typists were in high demand. With the coming of computers, the typing profession disappeared, but the need for web designers, graphic designers, and copy editors accelerated.

“Many technological platforms can create new tasks and jobs that nobody dreamed of before – think of radiologists, computer-assisted design, management consultants, or app developers – did anybody think that these jobs were likely to arise in the 1940s?” says Daron Acemoglu, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world’s leading technology and science universities, and author of Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. “AI has even greater capabilities to do that. This is the promise of AI. If it goes in a human-complementary direction, it can be a powerful tool to boost the productivity of workers with diverse skills.”

While a World Economic Forum report projects that jobs will be split evenly between humans and AI by 2025, some of the speakers at the FoE summit were confident in individuals’ ability to retain occupations that required skills AI hadn’t yet developed.

Professor Harlene Hayne, Vice-Chancellor of Curtin University, said during a one-on-one conversation at the summit: “Some of the professions that, over the past three or four decades, have been seen as primarily women’s work or probably not as prestigious, like teachers and nurses and psychologists and other allied health professionals; all of those jobs will still need to be held by humans.”

By learning to work with generative AI, schools and universities can better equip students for a changing job landscape that requires a plethora of technical skills.

“There is growing evidence that personalized teaching improves student outcomes, especially for kids from low socio-economic backgrounds or for those who are not native English speakers,” says Acemoglu. “The right tools would enable teachers to determine in real-time how the curriculum should be adaptively altered for different subsets of students.”

“The field of education has historically grappled with individual learning differences, and AI’s prowess emerges as a promising solution,” Sokefun says. “A prime illustration of this lies in the initiatives undertaken by Codar Africa, where personalized curricula, round-the-clock monitoring, and innovative assistance are fortified by AI. This technology aptly bridges the gap, offering students guidance akin to that of an instructor, yet unburdened by human limitations.”

Entrepreneurship is viewed as another solution to challenge the stubbornly high unemployment levels in Africa. Teaching entrepreneurship skills in universities can propel students to set up their businesses, which is especially helpful when they have limited job prospects.

But setting up a business comes with its own challenges. Entrepreneurs need financial resources, an acute marketing strategy, and a steady customer base to launch a venture successfully. ChatGPT and other forms of AI can help budding entrepreneurs and startups succeed as it’s immediately accessible to anyone, unlike other disruptive technologies. AI can cut business costs because process-driven activities such as payroll, onboarding, and IT help desk support can be streamlined. AI can also make workers more productive by combing through reams of data-rich, time-sensitive information so that they can instead focus on creating new things and solving new problems.

“For startups in Africa, AI offers an avenue to optimize resource utilization and trim costs, thereby fostering sustainability,” Sokefun says. “A prime example lies in the context of Nigerian and African companies, which can strategically harness generative AI tools like ChatGPT to expedite idea generation and research endeavors. The transformative potential of AI emerges in multifaceted ways, even extending to the creation of advertisements, videos, and textual content, removing the necessity of engaging external ad agencies.”

Instead of dreading the future, countries can use the new technology to their advantage and put Africa on the world map. Steering AI in a better, pro-human direction can unleash new boundaries of previously thought-impossible fruitions.

African universities such as the University of Johannesburg (UJ) are increasingly offering courses such as Master of Artificial Intelligence, which teach students how to use AI across a range of fields, including engineering, commerce, and computer science. In fact, UJ has also introduced free online courses to the public that make learners aware of how AI can transform economies, politics, and societies.

“With AI posed to reshape industries, traditional roles will evolve and transform,” Sokefun concludes. “The remedy lies in a proactive approach – meticulously analyzing the trajectory of one’s industry, identifying skills that will become obsolete, and redirecting efforts toward acquiring novel proficiencies demanded by the emerging landscape. By aligning one’s upskilling journey with the contours of AI’s trajectory, individuals can navigate the impending shifts with acumen and resilience.”