Vice President Yemi Osinbajo stated that the federal government will step up efforts to cultivate youth potential in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) for national development as Nigeria introduces the first humanoid robot in Africa.
The Vice President said this during the formal unveiling of Omeife, Africa's first humanoid robot, by the UNICCON group of firms over the weekend in Abuja.
The event's topic was "The future of Artificial Intelligence in the African Tech Ecosystem."
The federal government is fully supportive of such development because it stands to contribute to the fight against insecurity and national development, according to him.
He claimed that the success of Omeife is a clear indication that Nigerian youth are taking the bull by the horn and making enormous strides in AI development and other technological advancements.
According to him, "government is working on a national data strategy to make data available for scientific use because artificial intelligence is all about data, if your data is skewed, you will get a skewed result hence we must ensure that we have the correct data and a data the fully represents our culture and values.
"We need to encourage our indigenous African technology by encouraging our people to be digitally visible and get the data available for the artificial intelligence to use to take decisions that suit us and we also need to connect to the unconnected. To achieve these, the government is expanding its mandate to include initiatives such as the broadband plan to connect the unconnected."
"Most of the robots we have are not African so we are excited to see Omeife today with African data built and looking African because this will help us to boost our technology locally and to promote our culture and values because if we say we are going to use what is built somewhere, it will be difficult for us to benefit from the artificial intelligence.
He added that the government is developing additional regulatory tools to ensure responsible technology because, in addition to technology becoming increasingly intelligent, there is a need to effectively manage it so that it can benefit Africa and enhance lives there in accordance with the data at hand.
Osinbajo noted that technology could be a double-edged sword if left unchecked, which is why the federal government is taking all necessary precautions to protect Nigerians from any negative use and impact of technology, such as social media, through the code of practice for all social media platforms and other measures that will be revealed over time.
Osinbajo was represented by the Minister of Communication and Digital Technology, Isa Ali Pantami.
Speaking on behalf of Pantami, Kashifu Abdullahi, director general of the National Information Technology Development and Agency (NITDA), outlined some of the key advantages of AI for national development, including the use of robots in farming, education, construction of cities and roads, intelligence gathering, bomb detection, and security operations, among other applications.
According to the minister, Nigeria will soon open an innovation hub where young Nigerians may hone their AI skills.
Chuks Ekwueme, chairman of UNICCON Group, explained that Omeife is an AI that can be used in almost every field of human endeavour because it is powered by data that gives it a close resemblance to humans in terms of language, competence, movement, navigation, and behaviour using AI and computer vision capabilities.
He said "Our motivation for Omeife is that Africa has been lagging behind in technology and we keep forcing ourselves to use technology that is not designed for us hence, we came up with the initiative to bridge this technology gap in Africa and start making technology tailored to meet the needs of Africa and Nigerians.
"Omeife brings a lot of value in boosting security depending on the usage if it is surveillance, intelligence gathering, Robo-army, profiling and lie detection or even in the area of sending robots to missions that are very deadly but with the humanoid in place, all these will be taken care of.
"There are products that will be rolled out from Omeife ranging from Omeife as a service, Omeife hardware and Omeife humanoid robot which in total has market revenue worth 6.8 billion dollars across the African market and other parts of the world," he said.
Watch the video below;