What were African engineers and scientists doing or fascinated by in 2022?

Do you remember what many of them were talking about during that year?

I happen to remember because I was monitoring those conversations, as I do several other conversations. Many of our brothers and sisters on the continent were fascinated with their careers, as you do, posting on LinkedIn about their most recent achievement, published paper or conference attendance. There were the general discussions about climate change, food security and agriculture. There was also a lot of talk about infectious diseases and public health. Similarly, there were discussions about sustainable energy, water and infrastructure. In short, the usual African problems.

This is when the COVID19 pandemic was still a hot topic of discussion, and lots of Africans, not just scientists and engineers were decrying the vaccine nationalism that had been exposed by COVID19.

And discussions about AI and Machine Learning(ML) were largely unheard of, and only comprised a small part of discourse among African scientists and engineers. In fact it was bundling it under “digital technologies”, that makes AI more visible in 2022.

This is before November 30, 2022, when ChatGPT was released.

All this is supported by publicly available data about what the top 5 topics African Scientists and Engineers were talking about in 2022 👇🏾. The chart was prepared by Grok, and methodology (for repeatability) can be found on this public link

If you consider AI and ML on their own, this chart by Google Gemini is more accurate. Note that computer science was only 5.2 %.

The Google data can be found here for reproducibility.

But what is my point with all this?

My point is that if you now map 2025-2026 figures of the very same people(African Scientists and Engineers), you’ll find AI has moved up the list. Which is to be expected given the circumstances.

And that could mean a whole number of things, which I’ll not get into.

My concern, is considering everything that’s been said about AI the last few weeks; considering arguments on both sides the pro AI and anti AI camps, about the dangers of superhuman AI, about how intelligent AI can solve the toughest challenges of our time, it seems to me that African Scientists and Engineers are as is often the case merely following what the top AI labs are saying.

Even when there’s ample evidence that the top US labs don’t fully know what happens when Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is achieved.

Forgive my imagery, but it’s like a group of donkeys following a group of raccoons. It’s bizarre.

We are not stopping to ask who is being served by these things? Who will benefit from the technology the most. And if it truly is that useful, or that dangerous who actually gets a say in how it should be developed?

Africa is almost never in the conversation. And that’s a problem.

This also matters because lots of Africans are using AI. And if as a consequence of some uninteded eventuality, something bad happens, they too will be affected.

Further, if OpenAI or Anthropic became bankrupt, or were co-opted into the US military, for national security reasons, where does that leave African AI Research? What happens to all the investments that are being poured into AI?

Would it be the case again that the infrastructure, the funding, and the direction of the field were all decided somewhere else, by people with no stake in or concern for what happens on the African continent? That African researchers and institutions would be left reacting to decisions made in boardrooms and government offices thousands of miles away. Rather than actively shaping the AI technology and solutions that is currently being used on the African continent.

That’s the part of this discussion that seems to be missing entirely, and it’s the part I keep coming back to, again and again.

We were left in the cold when western countries cold-heartedly refused to share COVID19 vaccinations with us – even when they had vaccine surpluses. Even when they had vaccination rates of over 60% – 70%, and some of our countries barely had 5%.

Are we prepared yet again to be left in the cold when what some people are saying is merely an ‘AI bubble’ bursts?