Professor Elsie Effah Kauffman, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ghana, has challenged Africans to participate in creating digital technologies to address their own challenges.
He observed that the engineering of digital technologies was informed by the developmental and social challenges of the creators and may not address the African problem.
“Other people have developed the apps, other people have data there, other people are finding creative ways to communicate with the world, we just want to consume.
“We should get to the point of creating and contributing to developments happening in the world instead of just being consumers of what we receive,” he said.
Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Cape Coast, Professor Kauffman reiterated the critical need to be technologically savvy, but stressed that Africans and Ghanaians in particular should not just be the end recipients of technology.
On Artificial Intelligence (AI) in particular, the biomedical engineer noted that the technology was only powerful because of the data it was fed with and questioned the country’s contribution to the data.
He said that the people who produced the AI systems had their own inherent ways of seeing the world and since Africans did not make many contributions, they were only forced to assimilate.
“We contribute so little to this data. When you use an AI system and it gives you information, does it understand you as a Ghanaian and understand us as people with unique beliefs?” she asked.
“If you want to call an ambulance and you search the AI, it will tell you the number that is known because these are the people who help train this AI,” he added.
There was therefore a need to have local people who understand the African and Ghanaian systems to develop these technologies in that context, he added.
Source: GNA