Francis Fukuyama famously said in his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, that history had come to an end circa 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It announced the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Soviet Russia and, generally, of communism as an economic system, and, correlatively, the unopposed global spread of liberal democracy. One hundred and eighty years before Fukuyama, Hegel had said something similar when he saw Napoleon on horseback riding into the town of Jena in 1806. Napoleon was, for many in those early days, the symbol of the spread of freedom through Europe and against the tyranny of monarchy. There is today the suspicion coming from both Marxists and conservatives alike that the imminent transformation of the labour process, its complete automation through robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), will bring about the end of history.

The adoption of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa received a major boost after Uniccon Group, an Abuja-based tech startup, unveiled the continent's first humanoid robot. Omeife, the 1.8m female human-like robot, is African by design and has Igbo-like physical attributes. The battery-powered robot can speak Igbo, Yoruba, English, French, Swahili, Wazobia, Pidgin, Afrikaans and Arabic with native accents. Uniccon Group chief executive Chuks Ekwueme said: "Omeife also identifies objects and calculates positions and distances of objects." The launch of Omeife comes a few months after Abdul Malik Tejan-Sie, a South African-based Sierra Leonean innovator, presented a prototype of South Africa's first humanoid robot.

In Nigeria, the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics has significantly pushed the country to advance in machine learning, the …

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the world has grown increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Thousands of new innovations -- from contact-tracing apps to the drones delivering medical equipment -- sprang up to help us meet the challenges of Covid-19 and life under lockdown. The unprecedented speed with which a vaccine for Covid-19 was discovered can partly be attributed to the use of AI algorithms which rapidly crunched the data from thousands of clinical trials, allowing researchers around the world to compare notes in real time. As Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft observed, in just two months, the world witnessed a rate of digital transition we'd usually only see in two years. In 2017, PWC published a study showing that adoption of AI technologies could increase global GDP by 14% by 2030. In addition to creating jobs and boosting economies, AI technologies have the potential to drive sustainable development and even out inequalities, democratising access to healthcare and education, mitigating the effects of climate change and making food production and distribution more efficient.

Last week the daughter of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, Katerina Tikhonova, was appointed to head the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute located at Moscow State University. The university has produced 13 Nobel prizes, six Fields Medals and one Turing award, so in matters of science, putting the AI institute there is a big deal. In Russian, if a husband's last name is, for instance, Komlev, the wife's surname becomes Komleva. Thinking algorithmically, you add an "a" at the end of the husband's or the father's last name to get the wife's or the daughter's last name. So Katerina's surname is Tikhonova, which means that her husband's or one of her paternal ancestor's last name was Tikhonov.