Heal our World: Securing a Sustainable Future

By Tshilidzi Marwala

The world is emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, more fragmented and further away from the more equal and equitable iteration imagined in 2015 when the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were conceptualised.
As we hurtle at seemingly lightning speed towards the 2030 deadline to achieve these goals, the urgency is palpable. Although we have certainly strayed further away from the targets, there is still time to act in order to ensure that we inch closer to this vision.
Professor Tshilidzi Marwala paints a stark, and often grim, picture of our current context, one defined by monumental setbacks in the SDGs. Yet, as he carves out each developmental goal and its implications, it is apparent that there are tangible solutions that can be implemented now.
Tshilidzi's assertion that now is the time to act is backed by intricate and actionable data with a simple mission statement: we must heal the future.
He offers a new narrative that addresses how we can translate the latent potential that exists through technology, innovation and Fourth Industrial Revolution approaches to leadership and policy making to deal with, among others, corruption, poverty eradication, joblessness, an education system in crisis, declining economies and food insecurity.
Heal our World is a deep dive into the SDGs, particularly in the African context, and it looks toward securing a future in which our divisions are blurred, and our goals seem almost in reach again.
Tshilidzi Marwala, the author of Heal our World, Leading in the 21st Century and Leadership Lessons from Books I Have Read is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Johannesburg. From 1 March 2023, he will be the Rector of the United Nations University based in Tokyo, Japan. He was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Johannesburg and Full Professor at the Carl & Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Tshilidzi holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (magna cum laude) from Case Western Reserve University, a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Cambridge and a Post-Doc at Imperial College (London). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) and the South African Academy of Engineering (SAAE). He is a distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). His research interests are multidisciplinary and include the theory and application of artificial intelligence to engineering, computer science, finance, social science and medicine.
He has supervised 37 doctoral students. He has also published 23 books on artificial intelligence (one translated into Chinese) and over 300 papers in journals, proceedings, book chapters and magazines. He holds five international patents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Release date: Sep 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781998958603

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In an impassioned speech delivered in January 2022, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres declared, ‘The well-being of people around the world, the health of our planet, and the survival of future generations depend on our willingness to come together around a commitment to collective problem-solving and action.’

This signalled a call for a New Global Deal to share power, wealth and opportunities more broadly and allow developing countries to focus their resources on sustainable, inclusive development – mainly through achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs).

SDGs

The SDGs are 17 goals for global development – effectively a blueprint for significantly changing the world by 2030. To quickly run through them, the 17 SDGs are: (1) No Poverty, (2) Zero Hunger, (3) Good Health and Well-being, (4) Quality Education, (5) Gender Equality, (6) Clean Water and Sanitation, (7) Affordable and Clean Energy, (8) Decent Work and Economic Growth, (9) Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, (10) Reduced Inequality, (11) Sustainable Cities and Communities, (12) Responsible Consumption and Production, (13) Climate Action, (14) Life Below Water, (15) Life on Land, (16) Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, and (17) Partnerships for the Goals.

There is now a renewed sense of urgency, with only eight years until 2030 and the issue is exacerbated by the setbacks because of COVID-19.

COVID-19

In reality the COVID-19 pandemic has brought grief, death, illness and left immense destruction in its path. Last year it emerged that COVID-19 had led to the first rise in extreme poverty in a generation. In fact, the SDG Report 2021 found that in 2020, 119 to 124 million people were thrust into extreme poverty, and an additional 101 million children have fallen below the minimum reading proficiency level.

For the first time after the adoption of the SDGs in 2015, in 2020 the global average SDG Index score decreased from 2019 and this is driven by increased poverty rates and unemployment. This decline is also expected to be severely underestimated. Almost across the board, there were substantial setbacks to the progress of the SDGs. Importantly, it also demonstrated that our very staggered approach to the SDGs in recent years has contributed to these setbacks.

Africa Development

Guterres explained in a foreword to the report that the world was ill-prepared for COVID-19 because it had not fully embraced the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals. For Africa in particular, with varying degrees of development, political dissonance, and historically deep fissures of inequality and inequity, our recovery and road maps to rebuilding societies and economies are absolutely crucial.

In 2020, Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) contracted 2.1%, marking the continent’s first recession in half a century. The African Development Bank estimates that about 39 million Africans could be subject to extreme poverty and conditions of deprivation by this year if we do not devise interventionist strategies rapidly. How do we now translate the latent potential that exists to deal with poverty eradication, disease, joblessness, declining economies, and food insecurity – to name just a few of the wicked problems that besiege our continent? These challenges highlight the importance of science, technology, and innovation as our weaponry in any scenario of emergence from the crisis towards economic recovery as we take steps to a ‘new normal’. Creativity, innovation and the adoption and promotion of emerging technologies now take centre stage, as societal problems have shifted in the wake of COVID-19. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that although the SDGs are a guiding force, we need a tangible plan.

Technology and Innovation

In 2021, the African Union Development Agency NEPAD (AUDA-NEPAD) argued that African countries must reinforce and synchronise innovation and emerging technology policies and regulations to produce an enabling environment for Africa’s innovation and emerging technology development.

It was said that there was a need to close the gap between policy making and research for better innovation outputs. At the Consultative Meeting on Enhancing the Domestication of the Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa in 2021, Shireen Assem eloquently argued for the power of technology in providing solutions to some of society’s grand challenges. As she put it, technology would be ‘accelerating the growing economic inequalities between and within nations, opening doors to new markets, new technologies, and new sources of competition, which spur the creativity and productivity and form(ing) the basis of strategies for economic competitiveness.’

Various interventions are required. Firstly, infrastructure as a broadly defined term must be in place. Secondly, a coherent and enabling policy framework must be established, particularly in the realms of science, technology and innovation. Thirdly, education needs to be reimagined and revitalised at every tier. Fourthly, we must actively invest in research and development. Fifthly, we need to trigger and sustain business entrepreneurship. Sixthly, there is a fundamental need to foster local, national and international collaborations and networks. Seventhly, it is crucial for Africa to grow and participate in the global knowledge economy. Finally, we should ensure that there is a diversification of funding resources.

Leadership

What is apparent is that parallel to the goal of achieving the SDGs there is a need for a shift in leadership approaches. As we examine leadership against our grim context, it seems that although willingness is crucial, leadership skills are imperative. With the fast pace of change of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) era, we have to probe what these skills should look like.

Though there are several levels of complexities, it is apparent that a leader needs 4IR thinking, which entails the following skills: critical thinking, creativity, complex problem solving, people management, emotional intelligence, coordinating with others, judgement and decision making, negotiation, service orientation and cognitive flexibility. Significantly, we have to lead from a place of knowledge. Any knowledge gap in the understanding of technology, or of human competency or global economics derails the ambition of developing countries to succeed in the 21st century.

It is more apparent than ever that what we need is a revisioning of education, science, technology and innovation systems. Technologies should be embraced across communities, irrespective of geospatial locations, class differences and level of development. To hone in on the South African context in particular, the focus should be on skills development and fundamental economic reconstruction. In fact, alongside restructuring our education system, improving connectivity, opening barriers through developing the right skills base and creating effective regulation, the National Planning Commission (NPC) of South Africa estimates that South Africa must grow at 10% annually to absorb the over 700 000 new entrants into the job market.

In the South African context, this is a daunting task that all leaders across spheres face for a multitude of reasons. Economic growth is almost stagnant and was that way long before the start of the pandemic; our wealth inequality is considered the highest in the world and we are faced with a burgeoning unemployment crisis. If we are to stand a chance as a nation, we need decisive leadership, not only from government but at every tier of society. As we confront the ever-changing context, leadership at all levels must address this new world. Will we let intolerance define our world order, or will we build a sense of unity despite the confusion we find ourselves in? Will we maintain the widening of our inequalities, or will we identify solutions to some of our most deep-rooted inequities?

We are learning leadership lessons from the successes and mistakes of the COVID-19 era. If we use the pandemic as a measure of leadership strategies, it must remain unambiguous in our minds what contributed to the successes. How do we adjust to a changing world and our changing conditions, if those in power are ill-equipped? For instance, as we advance and reform our agricultural sector through land reform, do we have enough people who are knowledgeable in the political economy of agriculture to ensure global competitiveness and food security?

As we deal with the problems of our declining industries, we need to understand the problems of technology, automation and human capital to expand the quality of life of our people. This calls for a reimagining of leadership. Are we ensuring that our engineers, scientists, academics and philosophers are at the forefront of leadership positions? This is crucial if we are to close the leadership gaps that exist. This, after all, is also what the SDGs seek to address. The ‘old normal’, if you will, in Africa was marred and scarred by contextual realities that saw significant numbers of our people living far from ideal lives. If we are to enter the ‘new normal’, we need to reinvent and redefine it.

New Normal

In a powerful piece for the Financial Times in 2020 entitled ‘The Pandemic is a Portal’, Arundhati Roy wrote, ‘Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to normality, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves.’ The carving out of a new development path requires the above to be in place while acknowledging that science, technology, innovation and creativity must be foregrounded in our approaches to the fallout from the pandemic.

There is pressure on us to actively pursue multidisciplinary as well as multi-sectoral partnerships to foster and promote research in our quest for development, with social justice underpinning our agenda. What is evident is that we cannot simply live in this moment and obliterate valuable strides being made in pursuing our SDGs. It would be myopic and dangerous if we were to place these goals on a back burner. It is apparent that we have to stop talking about leadership in the abstract, or in terms of theoretical frameworks. We need to look at leadership in practice and understand that leadership requires layers of complexity to be unpacked.

The time is now for leaders (and here I will place some emphasis on African leaders) to embrace technology and use the 4IR, creativity, and innovation to drive the continent out of poverty and into a better future. This book is about how crucial it is to pursue the SDGs to achieve the development of our society.

PART A

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

This section contains 17 chapters, with one SDG as the theme of each chapter. The SDGs are:

#1 No Poverty

#2Zero Hunger

#3Good Health and Well-being

#4Quality Education

#5Gender Equality

#6Clean Water and Sanitation

#7Affordable and Clean Energy

#8Decent Work and Economic Growth

#9Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

#10Reduced Inequality

#11Sustainable Cities and Communities

#12Responsible Consumption and Production

#13Climate Action

#14Life Below Water

#15Life on Land

#16Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

#17Partnerships for the Goals

Chapter 1

Intelligent machines can end poverty

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL #1 – NO POVERTY

Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity.

We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.

– Ray Kurzweil

In 2009, my collaborators and I registered a patent in the United States for our invention that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to produce an artificial larynx.¹ The larynx is a vital human organ in control of our voices. Usually, people lose their voices when the larynx is surgically cut off because of cancer. The MIT Technology Review called this device the ‘Robot Voice’. While most gadgets leave the speaker with robotic or monotonic voices, our machine reconstructed the intended speech through a speech synthesiser to achieve a voice pattern close to the speaker’s original voice. Naturally, we wanted to protect our intellectual property of an invention such as this. We could do this by registering a patent: a commercial privilege given to inventors to protect their designs from infringement or use without the inventors’ consent.

Machine Creativity

While I always understood that there were many feasible patents for people’s inventions – especially with the advent of AI – I never thought that AI could develop patents. In 2020, South Africa became the first country to register a patent created by an AI machine. The invention by DABUS, a so-called ‘creativity machine’, was an interlocking food and beverage container formulated on fractal geometry. Commenting on the patent at the time, McLean Sibanda, an intellectual property expert, said: ‘This patent has been refused elsewhere in the world where patent applications are subjected to substantive examination before being granted. Main grounds have been that AI is not a natural person and thus cannot be an inventor, and as such cannot duly assign its rights to an invention to anyone to apply for a patent.’

As demonstrated in this case, AI is increasingly assuming a human dimension. It is logical then that the laws determining that only human agents can obtain patents are reviewed and revised. Australia is another country that accepts a non-human inventor. The US and the UK both ruled that AI cannot be the inventor of a patent, though intriguingly, US District Judge Leonie M Brinkema admitted that there is scope for AI to one day ‘satisfy accepted meanings of inventorship’. This shift in viewing AI is, in a sense, a manifestation of the Turing test, which suggests that a machine is considered ‘intelligent’ if the human who interacts with it cannot immediately tell whether what they are up against is machine or human. Building on this theory implies that patents can and should be extended to devices.

This is not the first time AI replicates the kind of innovation that has long been regarded as only a human capability. In 2016, Sunspring, an experimental science fiction short film entirely written by AI using neural networks, was released. Oscar Sharp fed the AI system called Benjamin hundreds of sci-fi screenplays from the 1980s and 90s and then instructed it to write its own. In 2018, 1 The Road was the first book authored by an AI machine. In a review for Singularity Hub, Thomas Hornigold wrote, ‘you might see, in the odd line, the flickering ghost of something like consciousness, a deeper understanding.’ Given that it was not human beings who wrote this screenplay and novel but AI machines, is it not rational for the authorship to be ascribed to the machines? If we can easily assign authorship to an AI system, why can’t we attribute a patent to an AI machine?

Economic Singularity

This era of intelligent machines executing production tasks independent of humans ushers economic singularity. Calum Chace defines this as the point when AI ‘renders most of us unemployed, and indeed unemployable because our jobs have been automated.’ To appreciate economic singularity, we should first grasp the concept of singularity.

At the beginning of the 20th century, physics faced an enormous challenge. The thinking of James Clerk Maxwell on the relationship between a magnet and electricity was no longer compatible with the thoughts of Sir Isaac Newton. James Clerk Maxwell’s rationale is so instrumental to modern-day life that we would still be stuck with candles and paraffin lamps instead of electricity without it. To reconcile Maxwell and Newton’s thinkings, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz proposed correction factors that were nothing but Band-Aids, and this reconciliation failed. In leadership, one has to confront the problems instead of lacklustre patching of contradictions that leave the wound to grow. Accordingly, it is essential to sharpen the contradictions to catalyse the revolution, and this is precisely what Albert Einstein did to reconcile the feud of ideas between Maxwell and Newton. To achieve this, Einstein proposed the Theory of Relativity.

Einstein extended the then existing theory of relativity to explain why objects fall, thus enriching another of Newton’s notions: the idea of universal gravity. Einstein’s thinking on gravity was so mathematically tricky and some of the solutions became so large that they did not make any physical sense, and this is known as singularities. Singularities are known as black holes, even though Einstein himself had misgivings about whether they could exist in reality. Singularities are regions in our universe where the forces are so strong that not even light can escape them. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, simply put, suggested a point in space-time where the physics laws as we understand them break down and thus suggest the existence of singularities and black holes.

The principal feature of a singularity is unpredictability. Economic singularity indicates a mode of production where machines surpass human intelligence to become the main drivers of economies. Therefore, they can create other devices and produce goods and services with hyper efficiency. As Evan Hurwitz and I argue in our book Artificial Intelligence and Economic Theory, labour will migrate from the human economy to the AI economy until it is no longer economical to migrate labour from humans to AI machines. This may be because the tasks involved are too complicated or too human to be automated.

Advancement of Production

The mode of production is an idea of Karl Marx and comprises the ‘means and relations of production’. The means of production are instruments that are used to produce goods and services. The relations of production are the relationships between labour and the mechanisms used for production. For instance, in the slave mode of production, the enslaver owned the means of production, including the enslaved people, and worked these enslaved people to death to extract surplus value or profit.

In the feudal society, the mode of production involved landowners obtaining profit from the serfs working for shelter and food. For the capitalist mode of production, the working class produce surplus labour or profit, which the owners of capital exploit. Marx borrowed from the French the terms proletariat for the workers and bourgeoisie for owners of capital. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels proposed abolishing private property to deal with exploitation in the workplace. The Soviet bloc tried to abolish private property, but failed spectacularly.

In the economic singularity era, a new mode of production is evolving. In this new mode of production, the means of production is gradually marginalising labour. Consequently, machines are replacing human labour in production, leaving owners of the means of production and AI as the only forces of production. As Jayshree Pandya wrote for Forbes in 2019, ‘the emerging potential of explosive economic growth for nations that adopt these existing and emerging technologies will likely affect the division of income between human labor and capital – challenging and changing the very nature of economic principles that nations are built on today.’ While current trends indicate that growth doubles every 15 years, technology can speed this phenomenon up to at least a quarterly basis. Various thinkers have used different terminology to describe the economic singularity era. Some people have used the phrases hypercapitalism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Whatever language we may use, the resulting relations of production will progressively be between owners of capital and AI machines used in production. These AI machines will be so complex that they will be able to invent other machines. The AI that registered a patent demonstrates this era. These machines will also be capable of predicting the state of their health and repairing themselves.

This phenomenon should not be downplayed. After all, it entails a redefining of the foundations of human society. As Kevin Morris, Electronic Engineering Journal’s editor-in-chief, aptly asked, ‘If robots automate all of our jobs, what use will the goods and services they produce be without people who can afford them?’ Various solutions can be pivoted in this new period where machines exceed our abilities. Abolishing private property in preference to nationalising the means of production to protect people from being impoverished is not the answer. If we continue on our current trajectory, there is the potential to increase wealth gaps as the owners of capital will continue to accrue wealth.

What is to be done?

Two things should be done. Firstly, these intelligent machines should be taxed. Not taxing either robots or the