POLICY ADVICE NOTE 306-26: Re: WE CARIBBEANS ARE NOT READY FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!
By Professor Gilbert Morris
In our typical fashion in the Caribbean everyone has a strong uninformed opinion about something we don’t make… and despite those strong opinions… the best we can do is say “AI is coming”, “we need to be ready”, “we must gain AI skills” then when foreigners and the manufacturers of AI retreat in fear - as they are doing now - we come with further empty phrases, like “we need to be careful with AI”.
Be careful how with something we don’t make, that we’re forced to use without knowing it… and which - because we like shiny foreign things - steals our data and life processes for sale beyond the reach of our debt ridden systems, stuck in the plantation modes we never reforms or changed?
AI is none of our business!
Before we go tongue galavanting through the usual empty talk and cliches, let’s at least try to grasp what’s actually happening to us:
1. We have been the first guinea pigs for AI since its inception. Do you really think American Airlines or Mastercard or Amazon would waste money paying employees to service us?
No: automated systems have been used for decades because - we love foreign peoples things - we never reformed our economic and social systems toward innovation… and so… we depend on their systems and can’t complain when those systems fail us. Therefore, our first line of of contact with automated systems forced us to conform to the system, rather than the system being cultivated around our needs.
Now today, these automated systems are digital with the same effects; except now, it collects our data: drive a Tesla… that’s a data collection device; have Starlink… that’s a data collection device; have Alexa…that’s a data collection device; your mobile and iPads…data collection devices.
In Europe, Singapore and South Korea, they have systems, methods and rules to prevent their people depending on foreign digital systems. China built a separate internet space with no Facebook, Amazon, Google, TikTok or Instagram. Everything is Chinese. People live in the Chinese WeChat system and no one collects your data for sale.
So what do you think AI would bring to us that’s new?
Nothing!
EXCEPT: it would collect more of your data and manipulate you into sharing more, until nearly all the country’s data is held externally… biometrics, click-patterns, finance and payments, all your texts, emails and photographs… all held abroad… but analysed and massaged to determine how to turn you into a product.
What's the point of telling people in that condition… don’t get left behind by AI? It’s nonsense of the first water and reveals a cluelessness that’s astounding.
In 1997, as a professor at George Mason University, I won the “Technology Across the Curriculum Award” for doing something no one else did: everyone tried to determined how technology could be used in the classroom. I tried to show how technology would eliminate the Univeristy itself… by running dozens of simulations… long before AI existed. What I saw for the university, one can see now for small states.
So what can we do?
We make nothing… we’re broke… we have the wrong concept of technology since technology is just jewellery to us; we are just users…!
1. We must build a “digital wall” around our country as Estonia and China have done. Without this, we are just lunch meat for tech companies.
2. Once we build that digital wall, we must develop a new biometric based alpha numeric identity and kill off all previous identification numbers.
3. Now following 1-2 above, (there are some constitutional issues to consider), we would have cut off foreign tech, service and credit card companies from our new IDs!
4. We must allow no foreign companies and no technologies inside that digital wall!
So how do we communicate with the outside world?
We develop interoperability protocols, permissioned APIs and QR code access that transmits our black-boxed identities without revealing the root biometrics. That means when you buy on Amazon or pay a credit card bill or a school fee or buy an airline ticket, an external code is generated that keeps your unique ID code protected.
Every Caribbean nation must adopt this model over the next three years.
Where does AI fit into all this?
Well, even with your “genetic code” outside the digital wall, foreigners will use AI, but we’ll be protected.
Inside the national digital wall, we can us AI for work flow management, for research, for data analysis, but these would not be connected to the world beyond our digital wall.
Don’t see how this streamlined thinking because now we know we must train 10,000 cyber security professional across the region and place them where?
ON THE DIGITAL WALL!
This is the only sovereign or independent future available for us and we are late and not a single CARICOM nation has the right combination of people or programmes to make this a reality. Not a single country is managing this directly from the leader’s office as a national priority the failure of which risk national catastrophe.
Not one!
CARICOM has no 24/7 initiative aimed to driving the region with a second CARICOM digital wall as a second tier of strategic protection of its member states.
We blundered our independence when we failed to reform the systems we inherited. Digitalisation is an even more critical moment; will we rise to the occasion or babble along trying to appear knowledge about what we can’t make?
