Dr Ave Kludze Junior, a Rocket Scientist at the United State National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA), says Artificial Intelligence (AI), is important and has touched every part of modern society positively.

He said AI was essential to the daily lives of humans, business operations and society generally as intelligence machines were influencing nearly every facet of life to help improve efficiencies and augment human capabilities.

Dr Kludze made the remarks remotely as a guest speaker at the 111th Speech, Prize-giving and Founder’s Day Celebration of Adisadel College hosted by the 1996-year group – Santa 96, on the theme: “Transforming Secondary Education and Preserving History: The Role Of Technology”.

As part of its social responsibility to the school, 25 years after completion, Santa 96 established the first African Digital Museum for a secondary school which has a collection of Adisadel College’s rich history digitized for easy access.

According to Dr Kludze “each generation has been endowed by their fair share of scientific discoveries and technological innovations; but never have we seen or read about anything close to the speed at which current technological advancements can or are impacting the globe – they spread so fast, it’s unbelievable.”

He said Artificial Intelligence had brought gene research – gene editing – stressing that human cloning was becoming less of an idea and more of a possibility bringing into question the moral implications thereof.

He indicated that facial recognition was a common feature in photo management systems as phones provided options using the face instead of password, and more advanced AI software was not only able to recognise every face in a photo, but identified them by name.

Dr Kludze who is currently NASA’s Senior Spacecraft Systems Engineer, said AI also identified emotions and was only one step away from being able to predict emotions, explaining that the combination of the two could have serious ramifications as it could be used to predict human behavour.

He, however, noted that research in AI had also led to the development of autonomous robots and weapons that may later outperform humans in decision-making, problem solving, and creativity, and questioned what humans could do if through inadvertence, a developed AI could not be controlled.

Dr Kludze expressed optimism that with the right planning, technology could solve most of Ghana and Africa’s problems, and said, Africa’s problems could be resolved with a mind-set of hard work to enable the continent to reach new heights in the field of technology.

The Right Reverend Dr Victor Reginald Atta-Baffoe, Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Cape Coast, in a speech, observed that the world was changing fast both economically and technologically which could help in the realization of conditions for successful working of national system of secondary and technical training and technological courses.

The outcome of that venture, he said, would sustain enormous potentials, build and resource human capacities to develop a well-diversified educational system.