Professor Tshilidzi Marwala is the outgoing vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Johannesburg, and on 1 March 2023, he will be the Rector of the United Nations (UN) University and UN under-secretary-general. He is the author of the upcoming book, 'Heal Our World'. He is on Twitter at @txm1971. I recently gave a talk in New York on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in Africa's development and was reminded of Kwame Nkrumah, the former Ghanaian president who said "we shall accumulate machinery and establish steel works, iron foundries and factories… it is within the possibility of science and technology to make even the Sahara bloom into a vast field with verdant vegetation for agricultural and industrial developments." More than 60 years after Nkrumah made this speech, we are still battling to economically develop Africa.

"We are standing on the beach, watching a fast-approaching tsunami, and all that we have around us are a few pieces of driftwood. We can continue trying to build a shelter from the driftwood in the few seconds that we have remaining, or we can figure out how we are going to use the driftwood to ride the ineluctable wave." I thought of this analogy when I was at a recent meeting held between some of the key players in the book production industry in South Africa. I heard many complaints of how "various philanthropists are bypassing the official library chain in South Africa by establishing libraries", "the number of books that were being registered on an official registry are lower than previous years" and so on. In many ways, I could picture myself sitting in a meeting with key players in the music industry about 12 years ago, around the same time that the likes of Spotify were gaining traction, and they would have been having similar discussions focused on the future of music.

This past Friday was arguably the biggest day of the year for retailers, particularly online retailers. Throughout last week, you probably received emails about massive Black Friday discounts. Some of you might have put together wish lists to check out at the stroke of midnight while others used your phones, to scout whether a 30% discount was worth the still hefty price tags. What you may be interested to know is that artificial intelligence (AI) has tailored your online experience. AI is a technology that makes machines smart.