What is the bigger threat to humanity's survival: artificial intelligence or human stupidity?

I’ve been thinking about being an entrepreneur and being “in the arena” this week. This quote by Theodore Roosevelt always stands out. Here’s to all of you, who are “in the area” today and “daring greatly”. Keep at it.

It is not the critic who counts; it is not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds;

If you want to back our efforts in the arena, a paid subscription is 80 dollars a year. It helps us keep the lights on and motivates our team. We are working hard, sweating, and pushing on building our back end. We appreciate you.

\AI is only successful if it’s responsible

The leading with AI conference by the Institute of Digital Data Design at Harvard was awesome. Congrats to

Karim Lakhani and his team for showcasing some of the most pressing AI questions and debates out there. One key overarching takeaway: “AI is only successful if it’s responsible.” Ethan Mollick thanks for giving all of us Co-Intelligence, his book, as a gift to all, and it is now my weekend reading.

The Cubies Awards

I had the privilege of hosting the Cubies, awards for innovators recognized for their AI contributions that were both technologically impressive and had a human-centric, ethical approach.

Gil Perry, D-ID

Gil Perry, the founder and CEO of D-ID, who is developing AI avatars. I really enjoyed this conversation because, as a reader of this Substack, you know that I have been dabbling in my avatar creation. You also know I see avatars as a huge education opportunity, especially in Africa (but I need the language issues addressed please). It’s also going to be a consideration in newsrooms of the future. I liked the efforts around privacy, ethics and addressing disinformation that this company is engaged in.

The Creative Reality™ Studio by D-ID offers you the most robust set of generative AI tools to produce stunning videos featuring digital people. Combining the powers of D-ID’s deep-learning face animation technology, LLM-based text generation, and text-to-image capabilities, the self-service studio is the essential platform for those seeking to create amazing and cutting-edge videos.

I got to chat with Michael Fleder, the founder and CEO of Covariance. This AI platform could be “better than wall street analysts.”

We turn raw, external data into the KPIs and dimensions that businesses and investors actually care about, with proven accuracy to give them confidence in their decisions.

Michael Fleder, Covariance

AI regulation

The AI regulation panel was excellent. The panelists debated the legal landmines and risks, social justice implications and existential risks. And with some great humor. The history of regulating electricity was debated and the conversation drew on this framework. Other points:

• government can not regulate AI
• First amendment rights
• Regulatory frameworks can not catch up with the pace of technology right now
• It's tough to deal with what’s happening now, while at the same time trying to anticipate where we will be in the next five years

The tech folks in the frontier companies do not give us all the information, and we are unclear on how they are each aligning internally. I liked this comment from one of the HBS professors

we don’t know what we want to do, we don’t trust you to give it to us, and we want it now. AI can give it to us now

Udio

I loved the video set up and conversation on creativity in AI with music, and it was really fun to watch Udio AI in action with Derek Ali. The conversation with Karim, Derek Ali and Bas was enlightening on what the future of music production and creativity with AI and humans would look like, and of course, it brought up plenty of ownership and legal issues.

Empathy and Algorithms

Here are some of my thoughts captured in opening remarks:

My sphere of work, communications and media, is facing a massive disruption by AI. But I firmly believe that the creativity, critical thinking and empathy of humans must be as important as the precision of algorithms. I often wonder what is the bigger threat to humanity's survival: Artificial intelligence or human stupidity. As Einstein said, and I quote:



Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and i'm not sure about the universe.



Building the guardrails for responsible AI, AI safety and AI ethics are essential.It’s what I am now doing by building the therundown.studio, an ed-tech platform for media and comms teams in emerging markets.

And on Africa:

As a Kenyan, my attention is focused on Africa, and how AI gives us the opportunity to level the playing field. There may be significant infrastructure and connectivity challenges, for now, but Africa has the greatest and biggest talent in potential engineers, product and design.



The continent is in a position to harvest a major demographic dividend. I urge all of you to look past the negative reports on Africa and invest in its potential. Come build partnerships with us.



Africa knows we need to own our stories, data sets, and technology if we are not to repeat our previous history of physical colonization with data colonization in the digital age.

No Dey Carry Last !

Building for an AI future in Africa

In the meantime, Here’s the full conversation between

Tomiwa Aladekomo at TechCabal, Ambassador Bitange Ndemo and myself on building for an AI future in Africa.

Look out for the next collab!