Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa has reiterated the need to explore and use AI in bolstering productivity in critical sectors of the Nation’s economy.
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.
Inuwa noted that almost entirely in ways that improve human health, safety, and productivity, 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.
The NITDA DG who highlighted some of the benefits of emerging technologies, especially AI, said that the algorithm which is the AI that powers social media is a machine that needs to be trained and controlled, 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.
“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.
“This invariably means that as a matter of principle, we should have redlines that AI must not cross. To achieve this, last year we started our journey by crowdsourcing on how to build National AI Policy and we have the first draft ready,” Inuwa maintained.
Inuwa recalled that when the present administration came on board, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu mandated the Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy to accelerate the diversification of the Nigerian economy by enhancing productivity in critical sectors through technological innovation, and expressed the belief that to achieve this, AI is the best tool to use in that regard.
“To take this further, we launched a call for research, where we are offering a grant to forty-five Nigerians to research Artificial Intelligence, so that we get feedback on how to use AI in Health, Education, Agriculture, Finance, Security and many more.”
“We are giving up to N5million to each researcher because we want to co-create and design the policy collaboratively, not the government using armchair theories to come up with the policies, we need everybody to be on board,” the Director-General noted.
The event, which was the 5th in its series was organised by Image Merchant Promotion Ltd in conjunction with Coalition Society Organisations also featured presentations on Security and Spokespersons Communication Awards as well as goodwill messages.
