Ai! Ai! Where Is The Data?

The title of this article is about an African exclamation whose true emotion is difficult to explain effectively as a lot of the body language with which it is exclaimed is lost in translation. But it involves considerable hand-wringing, some hair-pulling cum head-holding, teeth-gnashing and facial contorting.

I am fully aware that this publication is intended for English speakers, but I just could not find the right words to express how eloquently we espouse the expected impact of artificial intelligence and not the other bovine activity (artificial insemination) in our current and future lives, yet being totally oblivious to its underlying requirement, data.

As I sat through yet another well-attended conference on AI, I kept feeling like I was listening to someone reading a futuristic Sci-Fi novel with all the flowery parts without mention of what it would take to bring it to fruition.

After buying the Motorola StarTac flip phone, every time I flipped it to talk, it reminded me of the time decades before watching Star Trek and seeing the captain using the communicator, as it was called and not a mobile phone, to communicate to Scotty requesting to be beamed. Today we call it teleported from the surface of a strange planet, back onto the Starship – not Elon’s – Enterprise.

The show was first aired in 1966 and it took 30 years before I could hold the communicator in my hand. Not to call the spaceship, even though that is now possible with StarLink, but home to say I would be late at the car wash. Fortunately, the transporter had also not been produced. Otherwise, my wife would have been by my side in a flash to make sure that I was actually at the car wash.

Before we could get the equivalent of the communicator, we needed to have thousands of inventions patented and then commercialised before we could cut the umbilical cord on our telephone systems, a process that was so engaging that we had no time to develop the other fancy gadgets that were showcased on Star Trek.

So, as I sat and listened to presentation after presentation on AI, I kept wondering which single one would be the one that would come through like the communicator, and what it would take for it to become mainstream.

AI was described as ‘pervasive’ by 1999. We are in 2024, and most of it is still hype, fear and innuendos apart from maybe Large Language Models aka ChatGPT and its ilk which had been depicted in some form or other in the movie Demon Seed (1977). In the movie, a computer is given access to a network of computers like what today would be called the Internet. After ingesting the data, it realised that it needed to become human as it could do everything apart from feel the rays of the sun on its face.

So, my exclaiming ‘Ai! Ai!’ is because we are all discussing artificial intelligence with no clue as to where the data will come from to train it in a way that will make it relevant to us. We have no data being collected, leave alone stored digitally within Africa that can be used to train the LLMs. Yet here we are discussing how to utilise the output.

We have become too obsessed with working at high levels on technology to the point that we have taken the underlying requirements for granted. For which we shall dearly pay the price. As Proteus IV asked Dr Alex Harris in Demon Seed, “When will you let me out of this box?”