Al is deciding your future but South Africans are watching blindly

Artificial intelligence is silently shaping the everyday lives of South Africans, often without their knowledge or consent.

- James Maisiri

For instance, the South African Revenue Service (Sars) is using AI to enforce tax compliance, risk detection and improve taxpayer yer interaction.

The government deploys AI across departments such as the national department of health, which uses AI chatbots such as MomConnect and Zuzi Chatbot to enhance public service delivery.

Private organisations, such as Tymebank, use AI to improve their operations and customer experiences.

As the institutions adopt the technologies, algorithms increasingly make decisions that shape everyday life, often without citizens' knowledge or consent. This is alarming because most South Africans do not know what Al is. In one survey, 73% of South Africans have either never heard of the technology or have a minimal understanding of it.

When the public is unaware of how the technologies operate, algorithmic decisions that assist in governing a nation occur beyond democratic scrutiny. Democracy depends not only on voting but on citizens being able to see, question and influence the systems that govern them.

It was precisely this democratic gap that I addressed in a recent TEDx talk, The Hidden Danger of AI for Africa, which explored how AI systems imported from the Global North are often deployed in African societies without public participation, even though citizens bear the consequences of the technologies.