Prof Sam Takavarasha Jr: Research Blogg
A call for multi-disciplinary approach to deployment and development of Artificial Intelligence: Take aways from Prof A. Mutambara’s 7th Book Launch
Last night I had occasion to attend Prof Aurther 7th Mutambara’s book launch. I must confess that part of my incentive was the book title: Artificial Intelligence a driver for inclusive development and shared prosperity for the global South. This was my first chance to attend any of his book 6 earlier launches, I am therefore not sure if the audience attending the AI book launch was peculiar to it as I thought.
I saw experts from the Arts, Humanities, Business, Agriculture, politicians, and the usual Institute of Engineer members. There were about three cabinet ministers that Prof AGO kept referring to during his presentation. As the crowd continued to grow, someone said remember this is AGO, the former deputy prime minister is bigger than life. Assuming that, the diverse audience attending Prof Mutambara was not about his bigger than live persona, this in my view tells a rich story of Zimbabwean people’s interest in AI.
While I find artificial intelligence to be a topical area for all academics and practitioners that have any intellectual curiosity, I was also curious about the developmentalist flavour of the book title. The technology for development discourses is reminiscent of the ICT for development discourses that pre-occupied information systems in developing countries scholars during the early 2020s. Most of protagonists were drawing from development economists such as Jeff Sach, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and the late pragmatist Mahbub ul Haq who operationalised Sen's capability approach into Human development Index HDIs in the early 1990s.
The development agenda has attracted endless controversy including the critique of the 1950s dependence theory of Daniel Lener to the shock therapy of Jeff Sachs and several arguments in between. Contemporary discourses touch on digital imperialism, data colonisation and of course commodity dependency is a constant. There has also been a contentious debate about whether Africa should follow the same development trajectory as the West or the Asian Tigers. This appetite for mimicry is akin to the mordenisation theories shades of its contemporary adaptations. These debates extended to the terminology itself. Prof Mutambara’s book addresses part of it i.e. the developing and developed nations dichotomy. The terminology debates exposed the fatal flaws of concepts such as leap frogging and catching up with the West as expecting Africa to accept eternal mimicry of the West.
Given the hot debates of the early 20s one has to be mindful of the pitfalls that my fellow engineers and natural scientists fail to see. The main one is technological determinism as articulated by Mashal McLuhan who at the time opined on less effective and less convivial technologies such as radio and TV. Technological determinism naively suggests that introducing technology will cause positive socio-economic change. This has been debunked by several scholars such as Christianthi Avgerou and others who contest the assertion that technology alone is the primary driver of societal change. Closer home my colleague Nephas Mufutumari the ICT director at WUA repeats like a broken record that it is not the technology it is what you want to achieve with it. '
Several researchers on the role of technology in the global south / developing economies have pointed at under-uterlised telecentres across Africa as a testimony to the folly of technological determinism. Before putting my teeth on the pages of the book that Prof Mutambara launched last night at Conqenor House, let me hasten to say that the presentation was great. I am not accusing him of the hard tech determinism that purports that technology will autonomously dictate socio-economic outcomes for Africa. He called for Africa to adapt and deploy AI. He wants Africa to get involved in AI research and practice and he also advocated for us to build AI infrastructure.
By the way, he is not the only Zimbabwean to call for the same agenda to weaponise AI for our socio-economic development. Our government, our universities and UNESCO in particular have been making profound efforts to strategise and plan the deployment of AI in Zimbabwe. I have had occasion to participate in various efforts workshops and round tables by the Ministry of ICT Postal and Courier Services, POTRAZ and UNESCO. POTRAZ and the Ministry of Higher Education have taken a further step to sponsor and facilitate the implementation of emerging technologies. The universities, polytechnics and secondary schools have been participating in the Presidential Innovation Fund which has seen many universities including WUA walking away with impressive awards in innovation.
POTRAZ has been conducting Innovation drives in form of hackathons and ideathones since 2020. Some of us in ICT-related academic work have participated as judges and facilitators of the various endevours. We have seen impressive technologies being deployed by young people. Noteworthy ones being the Julia AI office assistant by David Chifunyise et al, and Timothy Kuhamba Stellar Aspirations among other greats.
Other green shoots include Old Mutual's 825 Innovation Hub which conducts annual hackathons e.g. Arduino day hackathons and the Hairtronics which is a workshop series for women during the women's month of March. They also sponsor the Nextgen Anchors Club which is a youth empowerment program which takes them through technical skills such as robotics and soft skills. Talking about the importance of soft skills, I was impressed to hear Arthur mentioning the need for soft skills, personal development and entrepreneurial skills. This is he said is what makes an innovator complete with technical and soft skills.
Given the growing interest in AI, the government programs and the green shoots of AI innovation that we see in tech hubs and hackathons and ideathons. I guess my takeaway lesson is to call for a Multi-disciplinary approach to AI adaptation and deployment. The diverse mosaic of experts that attended Prof Mutambara's book launch compels me to wonder why our universities are not reflecting the same diversity of experts who are interested in AI. As I walk down the corridors, chair conferences and review journal I see think walls barring academics from multidisciplinary collaboration. Some disciplines are content with using it but few ever take part in the development of AI. It is unrealistic for Zimbabwe to expect to harness the power of AI by relegating it to the technological geeks alone. Life is too multifaceted to be tackled by one discipline alone. Development itself is as multi-dimensional it consists of the social, the technical and commercial aspects that call for all academics to come together.
Our journals and conferences must consider encouraging articles that are authored by people from different disciplines. I encourage my intellectual peers to buy Prof Mutambara’s book, read it and continue with the discussion on development and AI. The content is great and the book launch was powerful, the best since 2009 when I attended Amartya Sen’s launch of his magnum opus entitled ‘The Idea of Justice’ at Oxford University’s great hall. Just Prof John Wood joked that Sen’s book did better than ones written by footballers’ wives, I must say that prof Mutambara’s Artificial Intelligence a driver for inclusive development and shared prosperity for the global South obviously did better that his books on politics.
Sam Takavarasha Jr is Director of the Research Postgraduate and innovation Centre
December 2024
As the year 2024 approaches its ending, I am glad to launch this blog. Through it I hope to have myself and subsequent director communicating with the research community at least once a month. I feel honoured and I feel challenged to be first director of research whose opinions are communicated to the WUA research community periodically. Ours is a complex community of practice which consists of communities within communities. Since the community of research is made up of various sub-communities, I urge our research community to enhance our research culture, harness our diverse research paradigms and use the new AI based research tools to build a better country as required by heritage-based learning.
By and large I believe that all researchers share a common pre-occupation to create novelty. At the risk of being misconstrued as harbouring an epistemological position which expects knowledge to be unearthed from somewhere, I must say that our agenda is to search and search again in other words to research about those gems of knowledge that have a positive impact on our lives. By our lives I don’t just mean human life, I include God’s workmanship that must live equitably in harmony with us. These cannot be enumerated easily because the universe is so vast. On earth alone I think we must be concerned about environmental stewardship, animal rights, human life and etc. This must be done from different epistemological lenses. Emmanuel Kant summarised them as ‘the stary heavens above us’ and ‘the moral law with us’.
Kant’s (1781) Critique of pure reason referred to natural sciences as the stary heavens that physics was preoccupied with at the time. He also referred to human sciences as the moral law that philosophy of religion was gazing at. Even as Kannt was one philosopher who was concerned about natural science and human sciences research methods on which our lives depend on, today’s research studies are seeing these categories from different philosophical positions. Qualitative research experts are hardly ever interested in quantitative research. The strength of seeing research from different epistemological and ontological stances is a gem that our academic community embodies. The overriding focus is achieving an outcome that improves the world if not the universe. With the exception of mixed methods and pluralist researchers, today’s researchers operate in silos that often refuse to intersect. This understandably is a challenge that comes from the paradigm war of the 20th Century which highlighted disagreements on ontology, epistemology and methods.
I hold the conviction that research methods should be discussed together with research philosophy. This is because I have noticed that all the contentious debates on research methods always get resolved by invoking research philosophy.
I strongly believe that generative AI is ushering a copenician revolution in research methods. Just as the age of ideology marked a transition in which mere “theory” divorced from “real life” and practical considerations was likely to be dismissed as irrelevant, obscurantist, and “utopian.” The era of generative AI and Zimbabwe’s heritage-based learning marks an era where research must genuine change lives. Since other experts engineers and architects seek to make a better world with their expertise, I believe that researchers must seek to use their research skills for making a better world as articulated by Geoff Walsham.
A world where we investigate the WHY, the How, the What and the WHEN. Researchers must keep discovering WHY things happen as they do i.e. explanatory, causal research and etc. The HOW could be our definition of a better world will again differ for different researchers in different communities of practice for different reasons. For that reason, the positions we take must be weighed against the philosophical lens through which we gaze at the unit of analysis we are working on. For instance, an interpretivist who shows subjectivity must not be questioned just as much as a positivist cannot be questioned for being objective. Above all the finding that come from these paradigms must be respected by all.
As academics we are required to understand the different research philosophies and methods for us to be able to function as educators of students who pursue different paradigms. Instead of the being the quantitative methods academic that won’t mark a qualitative methods study, we must be multi-skilled academics who can tell a good piece of work from any paradigm. Even is you believe that positivisim is a reductionist approach which overlooks the complexity and subjectivity of human behaviour you must be able to guide a student into a good positivist researcher. Likewise, you may criticise intepretivists for lack of rigor and generalizability or a critical theorist for their inherent bias and lack of objectivity in their research but you must understand how teach and assess their work.
Finally, let us stay true to our paradigms and let us do so to the highest possible standards. Our work must be robust and our results must be unquestionable. New tools and technologies which enable more interesting research methods are emerging. They enable the production of, and accurate results and findings in a more expeditious way. These new research tools, however, call upon researchers to constantly navigate a steeper learning curve. Its, therefore, time for us to collaborate with each other and learn from each other’s strengths and experiences. This will help us to climb to the zenith of academic excellence by fighting today’s proverbial wars using today’s research tools. These intentions are easier envied than acquired. We, therefore, need to roll our sleeves for the tough fight to build a powerful research culture by jumping on to the roller coaster of continuously perfecting our use of what we have adopted and scanning for new research tools that keep emerging.
Maybe the advent of AI based tools will answer Emmanuel Kant’s two questions, ‘Why are modern science and mathematics together so successful at giving us reliable objective knowledge of the physical world?’ And ‘Why do we find it so hard to get similar knowledge and agreement about the great questions of metaphysics or philosophy about God, the soul, free will, and ethics?’
In other words, will today’s AI based research tools bring to human sciences management and social sciences the undisputable agreement we have about the reliability, effectiveness and accuracy of the objective knowledge we experience in the physical world emanating from natural science research methods.
The answer is in continuous learning calls for collaboration in building a research culture. This is because the growth and development of research culture does not happen as fast as we want but it will bend toward fruition and progress if we keep investing hard work and effort.