In pre-Covid-19 days when fully-sponsored overseas travel was frequently available for us journalists, I sometimes got invitations to address a small conference on some foreign college campus, on one topic or another.
At one such conference many years ago, I used the then fairly new phenomenon of M-Pesa to explain something now considered to be utterly mundane: how a “technological leap” in the telecoms sector had transformed the Kenyan communications landscape, as well as brought financial inclusion to millions.
This is by now a story that has been told so often that there is no need to repeat it here. Indeed, I myself have used this example in many articles as well as in more than one presentation at a seminar or conference.
But in the specific case I have in mind here, what I found interesting is a question that was posed to me. The student told me that as far as he had seen, I had nothing but praise for the telecoms revolution that had come to Kenya. But it was his opinion that “All blessings are mixed blessings”.
What setback did I foresee coming from the overwhelming success of the adoption of low-cost mobile phones both for communication and for financial transactions?
My answer was that I seemed to detect an element of “magic thinking” entering the Kenyan mainstream following this great success story. That whereas what mobile phones could do was very limited and specific, some people – and not just naïve uneducated people – had begun to talk as though all our problems could be solved through the adoption of the right “technology”.
But then, I went on to say, there was no technological quick-fix to our really bad roads; no easy technological solution to children under the age of five dying for lack of medicines which cost less than a dollar per dose; no affordable alternative to the kerosene lamps that school kids in rural areas sat around to do their homework, in the process ruining their eyesight.
Indeed, even charging these mobile phones was a problem. I knew of cases where a villager who owned a bicycle made a business of collecting the dozen or so mobile phones in the village, cycling to the nearest trading centre that had electricity, leaving the phones charging while he went about his other business, and then collecting them and returning them to the owners in the evening.
In short, the kind of private-sector-led revolution that the mobile phones had brought to telephonic communications, was not likely to be available in the all-important energy sector anytime soon.
But then came a clearer appreciation of the threat of global warming. And with this, the rapid development of “clean energy” options like highly effective and yet inexpensive, solar panels.
Nowadays, you will find such panels being hawked door to door in some parts of the country, alongside cell phones and various peripherals, if I am to believe some reports I have come across. And they are even sold on credit.
In other words, what back then (I would say about 15 years ago) seemed to be an improbable miracle – decentralised, sustainable and affordable power supplies directly serving individual homes and small businesses – is no longer seen as miraculous at all.
And it is not just the telecommunications and energy sectors which have brought forth new technologies that perform tasks which seemed impossible just a decade or so ago.
In recent months there has been a great deal of excitement over the possibility that the writing of essays is a task which may soon be best left to computer programmes powered by artificial intelligence.
If anyone had told me that a day would come when an artificial intelligence programme could write opinion columns like this one, possibly better than I could despite my decades of experience as a writer, I would have fallen off my chair laughing.
But right now, not only is it obvious that this is possible. But for all you know, maybe I didn't even write this column myself.
Maybe I got someone who knows about such things to “input” the core ideas I had in mind into an artificial intelligence programme, which then wrote this column for me.
