PETER BRUCE | In bits and bytes, the next invaders are coming

Very late in the day South Africa has begun what may be a losing or a confusing battle with AI. Humans are already compromised by the most basic internet. Our addresses, our history, relationships and what we think are easily available to anyone without our permission.

And as companies, mainly in the US, make explosive advances weekly in AI, the government has just published a draft AI policy. I read it, and while I’m no expert, it struck me as a fundamentally hurried defence against whatever AI may throw at us.

“Many South Africans remain excluded from digital services due to a lack of connectivity, affordability challenges or inadequate digital literacy,” it says. “The underlying policy imperative is to develop a comprehensive, inclusive and ethically grounded national AI policy that ensures responsible innovation, protects public interest, and advances social and economic transformation.”

Blah blah, though I suppose it’s good something is being done. So far the state has blithely ignored the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), throwing unimaginable amounts of money instead at industrial relics like steel or Eskom or BEE initiatives designed to ensure black people manufacture everything from pumps and valves to car mirrors.

None of these has moved the economic dial much and compared with what’s coming, they are mere bagatelles. AI is in its infancy, and the models developing in the US and in China will inevitably compete with each other. They will hack each other. When that happens, the models will assume our most base human impulse — survival. They will develop a consciousness. They will sense threat. The tech will stop merely improving and begin to evolve on its own.

Tech company Anthropic has developed a product, Mythos, so powerful that Anthropic says it’s too dangerous to release. The Washington Post reports Mythos has autonomously identified thousands of bugs in existing IT systems. It can fix them or exploit them. Banks are particularly distressed about it.

AGI tech will train itself ... it will reason and learn on its own. And it will protect itself

I’ve used AI to help write this, but what’s really worrying is that AI itself is poised for an exponential moment where it moves from narrowly being able to code faster than humans. Experts agree that by 2030, AI will be replaced by AGI, artifical general intelligence. Then all bets are off.

AGI tech will train itself, regardless of what it is asked to do. It’ll be capable of effortless operation across domains (ChatGPT’s example is it could write code then switch to medicine and then debate philosophy). In other words, it will reason and learn on its own. And it will protect itself.

And unless you’re wedded to the notion that only the ANC can do redress in South Africa, give AGI a few seconds and it’ll easily find replacements for BEE that don’t cost the earth or exclude bright people who aren’t black. But unless the government pulls finger, those solutions will be American.

A key problem here is a dearth of computing capacity. Our most powerful computer, our “supercomputer”, is Lengau, in Cape Town, owned by the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research. It can operate at one petaflop, or 1,000-trillion calculations per second. Sounds impressive, but Morocco has one that operates at 3.5 petaflops. El Capitan in the US does 1,809 petaflops. The Chinese are hamstrung by sanctions on advanced US computer chips.

The US leads the tech that makes the machines that make the chips driving the supercomputers that drive AI. And it’s hard to disagree when former MTN CEO Phuthuma Nhleko argues in his new book, The Invisible People, that it is “pivotal that when making policy ... African countries do not focus on training for the industries of the past. Big data is the fuel that feeds the new industrial revolution and particularly AI. Africa losing effective control of its data would be tantamount to another extractive colonisation — a digital one. And due to the almost invisible nature of data capture and management, this digital-age colonisation would be hard to reverse.”

So while we keep Elon Musk, one of the leaders of 4IR, out of the country (he is hard to like, but peace is not something you make with your friends), we’ve raised not an eyebrow at France’s Canal+ buying MultiChoice. Think of all those Africans whose data Canal+ now owns. Typically, the ANC spent all its clout ensuring the French didn’t retrench anyone. It blinked not an eye at the most precious thing MultiChoice had — our data.

Data is the new oil, Nhleko reflects, but “unlike oil, data is renewable”. And, sadly, ignorance is everywhere. Just this week Blade Ndzimande’s department of science & technology ran an online advert extolling the importance of (our) platinum to battery-powered vehicles, oblivious to the fact that there is no platinum in an EV battery at all. Oh, dear me. The clock is ticking ...