What ancestral intelligence can teach us about AI | Nanjira Sambuli

What can the African savannah teach us about AI? Take this journey with me. Across Africa, proverbs are a cornerstone of the oral tradition through which Indigenous knowledge and wisdom has been passed down from generation to generation. The Yoruba people of Nigeria say that a proverb is the horse that can carry one swiftly to the discovery of ideas. One of my favorite proverbs says, when elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers. And it has guided me in making sense of much in the world today, especially with all the developments in AI. The elephants can symbolize great powers, be they nation states, corporations, broligarchies, while the grass comprises people, geographies and ecologies considered resources to exploit, wastelands or charity cases. Great power competition, as we're living through today, emphasizes the power of the metaphorical elephants in their quest for dominance over resources, ideas and innovations. In the case of Africa, not only are we caught in the middle, but we comprise a key battleground over which elephants are fighting over natural and human resources to power the intelligent age. Meanwhile, our perspectives and ambitions tend to be drowned out by the din of the elephants. But what can we discover when we look past the elephants fighting and zoom in on the grass? Well, for one, we can learn a simple yet profound concept: I am because you are. This sums up a set of value systems that emerged among the Bantu people of Africa, and is known as “utu” in Eastern Africa and “ubuntu” in South Africa. Utu and ubuntu instill in us a profound appreciation of humanity as a quality we owe one another. And it's not just about the relationship between humans. Ubuntu is also about our relationship with nature and the spiritual or cosmic. Ubuntu reminds us we ought to be developing technologies like AI for the benefit of all of humanity and our ecology. Across Africa, we have exciting examples of embracing the wisdom of ubuntu to inform data governance, AI product design and community building. I call it ubuntech. (Laughter) AI development today treats data as if it's an abundant natural resource, and we hear this in sayings like, “data is the new oil.” But already the limits of this paradigm are being realized, as researchers have been sounding the alarm that high-quality data to train AI models is drying up. Through ubuntu, we conceptualize data differently, and we appreciate that it represents lives, cultures and communities, so that data governance for us is about the meaningful participation, informed consent, self-determination and community ownership of data sets from which language, nature-based knowledge and Indigenous wisdom are derived. (Applause) Thank you. And this has inspired a concept like data justice in our African policy frameworks. Data justice matters because it means that women, rural women in Africa, for example, who possess unique knowledge about agriculture, food production, medicine and environmental protection are represented and visible in data systems and agritech solutions. Then, when we've been told ours are low-resource languages, we're resourcing our languages. Conventional AI wisdom demands large language models, but African practitioners are making do with little language models. See, driven by efficiency as a core value and inspired by our relation to nature, initiatives like Lelapa AI have developed lightweight African language models that are serving our communities without requiring extensive resources. Their Inkuba small language model has been inspired by the dung beetle, which can roll up to 250 times its body weight. It's small but mighty. Inkuba is trained on 0.4 billion parameters and outperforms larger models in sentiment analysis and displays remarkable consistency across multiple languages. We're also building collaborative AI communities. We have Masakhane, or building together, across over 30 African countries, to strengthen natural language processing in our research. And this grassroots organizing approach has set out to demonstrate that low-resourceness of languages is not a data problem, but a societal one best solved through participation. In fact, Masakhane have developed a non-traditional authorship model that acknowledges and includes all contributors in published papers. Be it that you contributed data, lived experience, coded software or coordinated research participation. And this way, they've been able to publish translation results for over 38 African languages. These examples of ubuntech are our way of charting an alternative path to developing and deploying AI solutions in Africa by Africa and beneficial for Africa. Ubuntech matters for a number of reasons. For one, we are asserting agency to conceive and build AI futures beyond just the ambition of the metaphorical elephants and to contribute to a global commons. It also allows us to bring forward the Indigenous wisdom of our ancestors so that ubuntech is artificial intelligence powered by ancestral intelligence. (Applause) And we also get to remind the elephants, they may fight and wield their might all they want, but they are also bound to suffer if they trample upon the grass to the point of irreparable damage or extinction. But when their power is exercised in relation to others, it makes them ecosystem engineers and redirects their energy towards helping sustain a healthy and beneficial environment for everyone. And we see this in the savanna. When African elephants leverage their power to trample upon dense shrubs and acacia trees, they make room for smaller species to coexist. When they disperse seeds as they trek across the land, they help generate new growth and maintain the biodiversity of the savanna ecosystem. So in relationality, in coexistence, the power of the elephants is majestic. And it's a life force for themselves, other wildlife, and the savanna ecosystem. I believe if we can reimagine humanity beyond just the ambition of the metaphorical elephants, we can realize a world that benefits everyone. So I implore all of you, take heed of the grass beneath your feet. Our collective future depends on it. Asanteni. (Cheers and applause)