Author: The Conversation

by Daniel Gervais, Vanderbilt University and John Nay, Stanford University Only “persons” can engage with the legal system – for example, by signing contracts or filing lawsuits. There are two main categories of persons: humans, termed “natural persons,” and creations of the law, termed “artificial persons.” These include corporations, nonprofit organizations and limited liability companies (LLCs). Up to now, artificial persons have served the purpose of helping humans achieve certain goals. For example, people can pool assets in a corporation and limit their liability vis-à-vis customers or other persons who interact with the corporation. But a new type of artificial…

by Arno J. van Niekerk, University of the Free State South Africa must tread carefully in its economic relationships to avoid being caught in the escalating tension between east and west, and more specifically China and the US. The country’s hosting, and the outcome, of the 2023 Agoa Summit should strengthen its role in diplomatic relations and contribute towards safeguarding the country’s economic interests. From 2-4 November 2023, the US and 35 sub-Saharan African countries will meet in Johannesburg for the 20th Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum (Agoa Forum). It entails strengthening trade and investment ties between the US…

By Ravi Sen, Texas A&M University Google, Microsoft and others boast that generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will make searching the internet better than ever for users. For example, rather than having to wade through a sea of URLs, users will be able to just get an answer combed from the entire internet. There are also some concerns with the rise of AI-fueled search engines, such as the opacity over where information comes from, the potential for “hallucinated” answers and copyright issues. But one other consequence is that I believe it may destroy the US$68 billion search engine optimization…

by Edward Webster, University of the Witwatersrand From US car factories to public sector workers in Nigeria and South Africa, strikes by trade unions continue unabated among the established sectors of the working class. In Detroit in the US, workers are resisting contract employment. In Nigeria they are angry over the rising cost of living and in South Africa, municipal workers are striking for better wages. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to build sustainable worker organisations as companies employ more people on a casual basis in the digital age. Work has become more precarious and workers are easily replaceable. In…

by Claire Seungeun Lee, UMass Lowell Each day, you leave digital traces of what you did, where you went, who you communicated with, what you bought, what you’re thinking of buying, and much more. This mass of data serves as a library of clues for personalized ads, which are sent to you by a sophisticated network – an automated marketplace of advertisers, publishers and ad brokers that operates at lightning speed. The ad networks are designed to shield your identity, but companies and governments are able to combine that information with other data, particularly phone location, to identify you and…

by Dipuo Winnie Kgotleng, University of Johannesburg and Robyn Pickering, University of Cape Town When a Virgin Galactic commercial flight soared into space on 8 September 2023, there were two Virgin Galactic pilots, an instructor and three passengers on board – as well as two fossils of ancient prehuman relatives from South Africa. Timothy Nash, a businessman, carried a clavicle belonging to Australopithecus sediba and the thumb bone of a Homo naledi specimen. The fossils’ brief journey – the VSS Unity’s flight lasted just an hour – was organised by palaeontologist Lee Berger, who led the team that discovered and…

By Renaud Foucart, Lancaster University After many years of designing and selling a variety of different cables to power and charge its devices, Apple has slowly switched to USB-C chargers for all of its products. The last device to swap is the iPhone, and it happened against Apple’s will. In October last year, the European Commission requested all phones and laptop producers switch to the USB-C connector (which had earlier been agreed on as a common standard). Apple could have chosen to ignore the request and stop selling in the EU, or to produce versions with USB-C for the European…

By Mark Bailey, National Intelligence University There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily. But AI systems have a significant limitation: Many of their inner workings are impenetrable, making them fundamentally unexplainable and unpredictable. Furthermore, constructing AI systems that behave in ways that people expect is a significant challenge. If you fundamentally don’t understand something as unpredictable…

By Imraan Valodia, University of the Witwatersrand South Africa is ranked one of the most unequal societies in the world. The Conversation Africa spoke to Imraan Valodia, a professor of economics and dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at the University of the Witwatersrand, about inequality in South Africa. Has income inequality got worse in the last 20 years? According to the most recent data, South Africa has the highest income inequality in the world, with a Gini coefficient of around 0.67. The Gini coefficient is a widely used statistical measure of how income is distributed in…

by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, SOAS, University of London Bad data does not only produce bad outcomes. It can also help to suppress sections of society, for instance vulnerable women and minorities. This is the argument of my new book on the relationship between various forms of racism and sexism and artificial intelligence (AI). The problem is acute. Algorithms generally need to be exposed to data – often taken from the internet – in order to improve at whatever they do, such as screening job applications, or underwriting mortgages. But the training data often contains many of the biases that exist in…