Astana, Kazakhstan — African speakers featured prominently at the recent How to Form a Synchronized Vision of the Future conference in the Kazakhstan capital of Astana in the heart of Central Asia to explain their views of what might happen.
Connected-2024 assembled more than 1,500 participants on October 18 from 27 countries, including futurists and experts who shared insights on the future of humanity, including speakers from Africa, who sought to forge a vision using the rapid advancement of technology.
"We invited researchers, futurists, leaders in innovation and technology, and public and government figures to the conference. With them, we hope to achieve the main goal of the Connected conference — to find a path to global harmony in the future," said Serik Tolukpayev, the Kazakhstan entrepreneur and founder of AITAS holding, the main backer of the meeting.
"To do this, it is necessary to create a vision of the future world, including our country, over the next 20-30 years."
As well as South Africa and Cameroon, conference attendees were from the United States, UK, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Poland, Croatia, Finland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia, China, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Israel, Turkey, the UAE, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.
"It is not easy to make IT hubs in Central Asia because it is a bit smaller" than other big centres in Asia, Europe, and North America," Tolukpayev said at an Astana press conference.
He stressed that IT is crucial to that future at a press conference, noting that information technology is richly embedded in young people in Kazakhstan.
FORMER SOVIET REPUBLIC
Kazakhstan is the world's ninth biggest country, with a population of only around 20 million people and with neighboring countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, it was once part of the Soviet Union.
The general sponsor of Connected is AITAS, a key Kazakhstan agro-industrial holding, with strategic partnerships from the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Education and the country's Ministry of Science and Higher Education.
Cameroon-born Mamadou Kwidjim Toure grew up in France and spent 12 years working from Johannesburg.
"I founded Africa 2.0, a not-for-profit pan-African civil society organization focused on creating a sustainable vision for Africa's transformation," Toure told All Africa.
Forbes Magazine in 2014 recognized him as one of Africa's Top 10 Most Influential Men.
He founded Ubuntu Tribe, a digital platform that uses the tokenization of gold and other natural resources to promote financial inclusion and wealth redistribution. His efforts have earned him a finalist position at the African Bankers Awards in 2019 and a spot among the Top 30 Most Influential in Blockchain Technology in 2020.
"Today, I spoke about catalysts for change and how movements can accelerate change and usher in new societal paradigms that help humanity to progress. I mentioned how small movements or disruptive thinking can be applied, either through social entrepreneurship or business, to affect change," said Toure.
"I'm the founder of Ubuntu group, a FinTech company that issues digital certificates for ownership so that people can buy gold. We focus on the tokenization of real-world assets to access shared prosperity and allow anyone to access it, regardless of place of birth and wealth at birth. So, we are a champion for financial freedom."
Bronwyn Williams, a futurist, economist, and business trends analyst from Johannesburg, told the conference the most significant threat from technology is total convergence.
It is the idea of technology as a piece of code that determines whether people are guilty or innocent, or a good investment, or a bad investment.
Conversely, she says the way to deal with that is more competition.
"So, competition, as opposed to regulation, is probably a more sustainable way to deal with exponential technology," asserts Willims.
But it's tough to regulate because you can only regulate what you understand if you're regulating from a very blunt instrument perspective.
"We need to be guarding against those single points of failure, and the way to deal with that is through more competition. That means, if we are lobbying regulators for anything, we should be lobbying for more competition."
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VIGILANCE AGAINST MONOPOLIES
She says vigilance is needed against regulatory monopolies that effectively give power to bigger companies at the expense of small ones.
"Unfortunately, that's the irony of regulation. Bigger companies are better equipped to navigate the cost and complexity of such laws and regulations where small ones are increasingly cut out, and the economy is a scale of the digital, global, borderless economy we are building. It makes the idea of competition that much more precious and that we have to protect."
Monika Bielskyte, another Johannesburg-based futurist and speculative designer, was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in Lithuania, witnessing the simultaneous collapse of the physical walls and the opening up of the digital world.
As a speculative designer, Bielskyte launches culturally expansive, socially and environmentally engaged future world designs to help make conversations on the future more accessible.
Korean professor Raekwon Chung, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, was one of the keynote speakers and participants.
