Is AI The New Digital Divide?

I was not intending to write yet again about artificial intelligence (AI). I was, instead, going to write about data centres and the fact that organisations still treat their data centre infrastructure as a side hustle. But. I will leave that for another day.

I was thinking of the article on data centre infrastructure, for which I wanted to get some information regarding the percentage of the costs of a greenfield data centre project, complete with compute, that is infrastructure. My initial idea was to look for some of the projects we had done and see what the data centre infrastructure costs covered as a percentage of the entire project. In most cases, we had the entire project cost including the numbers on installing toilets in managers’ offices.  Then a brilliant idea popped into my mind. “Why not ask ChatGPT or Microsoft CoPilot?”

Brilliant me let me ask an AI to answer the question for me. And since I have three AIs open at any given moment on my computer, all I needed to do was switch to one of the already open windows with AI and type in the prompt for what I needed. Two prompts later, I had the information I required. I had allocated 30 minutes for the exercise of information-seeking, yet it had only taken me three minutes. I had 27 minutes to kill.

For those who want to know what the result was from the query, the data centre infrastructure is only 20 per cent of the total greenfield costs. Which will likely not see a refresh for the next 20 or more years, while the compute will be refreshed at least twice during the same period. The main reception, meanwhile, will see at least three redesigns.

So down the rabbit hole of AI prompts I went. First generating a few images, and then off to answer questions that have been haunting me for years.

The most pressing one was about how soon after independence we had our first major indigenous corruption scandal. This was both a nagging issue as well as a test as to just how much of our data has already been ingested by the LLMs. I typed in the prompt and pap! I had the answer. The first post-independence corruption scandal was in 1964 during the construction of the new estates in Eastlands such as Ofafa Jericho. A politician was charged with receiving kickbacks for the project resulting in the project costs skyrocketing. My second pending issue was the relationship between university student graduation/enrolment and the GDP growth of the country. The results were too contentious to share. For those who can stomach serious bad news, I suggest you run the query yourself as the results are not pretty.

So, whatever we say about AI, my takeaway from my visit to Alice Land is that AI shall increase the digital divide more than tenfold. And with no data or compute of our own, we shall find ourselves truly as the proverbial dark continent once the charging begins.