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Kashifu Inuwa, Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), has called on Nigerians to explore and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in bolstering productivity in critical sectors of the nation’s economy.
Inuwa made this known while delivering a Keynote Address on “Artificial Intelligence: Effective Communication for National Security” at the 2023 Security and Spokespersons Awards and Conference which held in Abuja.
Inuwa alluded to the fact that artificial intelligence is already changing daily lives, almost entirely in ways that improve human health, safety, and productivity.
He averred that AI is beyond a tool, as it is a new way of building a relationship between humans and machines.
“In building that relationship, we need to look beyond just having a tool we use for our daily activities and start thinking in the direction of developing a system which can help meet certain human needs”, Inuwa said.
While highlighting some of the benefits of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, the Director-General said that the algorithm which is the AI that powers social media is a machine that needs to be trained and controlled, in order to avoid it spiralling out of control.
“Due to the happenings on social media, industry practitioners are pushing for “explainability in the AI”, also referred to as “black box” within the AI algorithm”
“Imagine having a system that makes decisions for us and does not understand the way it came about making that decision, now, that is indeed a red flag, having AI go out of control, so, we need to get AI to be always for humanity, because it is the most existential threat to humanity today”, the DG stressed.
Inuwa said, “countries around the world are making efforts toward deciphering the functionalities of artificial intelligence and coming up with policies and putting standards in place to ensure they are AI ready countries, and so Nigeria cannot take the back seat”.
“In Nigeria, we are looking at it from three perspectives; having AI ready principles, data and AI ready security”.
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