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The struggle with many a rigid Logooli cultural practices

  The Logooli community is one of the deeply cultured societies – with near everything supposed to have been done as per custom – to allow another custom to follow. One example is that for a mature man (with a child or more) to be buried, there must be a house structure at home. Another is that a boy must be circumcised and nursed in father land. If maternal family decides to, the boy will have a hard time reconnecting with father people - a dent on his masculinity. There were two children who got burnt to death in a house in Nairobi. The single mother had left for night work. Elders were told that one of the children was Logooli. The other, the woman had sired with someone else. The Logooli family wanted to burry their little one and long discussed the do’s and don’ts. Of a man who died childless and the grave was placed as if he had died as a man with children. It should have been dug on the sides, the grave. A real thorn should have been thrust in his buttocks, his name go...
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AI & African Languages - A case of Ululogooli

 

image: AI simulation, Original: Getty Images


It is mouth-gaping to watch AI videos. Just how fast the world seems to be changing out there. Yet we, in the villages, are passive. Not responsive in the ignorant manner but the extent of awareness, because I often record my conversations with grandma, 95 years. I keep a daily diary in mother-tongue, for what? Something I can’t tell, which I am part of, asks me to go on, document as much. Saniaga blog is a mini-Wikipedia, I will be celebrating 10 years of having a say next year. Humanity is evolving and the steps may not be as sharply defined. But AI is a shocker. 

An example is my grapple with Ururogōri. It is feared endangered, and it will follow other extinct languages if nothing is done. Writings books about it will not help. Asking people to speak it won’t either. Traditional methods of trying to stretch things no longer apply. But making it ‘an available option’ in the mainstream, might keep it on. For instance, having Ururogōri in the auto-translate or auto-interpret. That the 9pm Radio or TV News or the Nat Geo documentaries can be 'heard' in Ururogōri and not English without having a person in between – only the remote controller. Intelligent and nice, huh?

Being a lover of Greek mythology, AI would take me little time to collaborate with Theatre groups that have acted plays as of Sophocles’, Aeschylus’ and Euripedes’, unlike without AI – a life-time. It would have taken me a second lifetime to translate and review Shakespeare works and a third to act Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Antonio among others. But AI is a tool in which by a string of characters I can do this and more in the remaining few years of my youthhood, to sit and marvel at all these in the favourite Ururogōri sounds at my adult stage. That is my utopia made real. 

Where to start, is in the basics. Like in Medicine, AI goes for the building blocks and seeking deeper about the nature, from where so much is deduced [On top of contemporary knowledge] for unlimited outputs. For Ururogōri, having prioritized structure and grammar over random speech, it is a step to keeping the path focused and having the initial steps organized from which the dynamics as of random speech can be pointed out. Understanding this is a key step towards that growth. 

This takes time and needs resources that may not be available and only at the efforts and mercy of visionaries. There are overlapping priorities towards this development, including inherent degenerates of evolution as survival for the fittest [going for 'bigger' languages]. Google’s or Meta’s [parent company of Facebook] expenditures on Innovation are way above African Countries yearly budget approximates. How then will Africa be contributors to the AI development and not be ‘colonized’ again? Code languages are not English or French that we thought learning in school would leverage us. The codes are getting complex. 

I agree with tech Mo Gawdat’s fear for Singularity [a champion for one billion a happy] in developing AI while considering Ururogōri. There are the dialects to capture, the intonations, the feeling of conversing in it, the unknown structure and more. We may have lost the past uniqueness and pleasure, or dynamics derived in the language and unfortunately as more well-versed elders die without contributing to this tool makes it a loss today. Yet we cannot encompass everything. 

Avoiding finding all seats taken by others, it is a wakeup call to know how AI development would accommodate African languages as Ururogōri from which the much-needed Ethics and AI development would benefit from. Much as there may not be immediate profiting gains as businesspeople would wish, the language contributes knowledge and diversity to the tool. Also, incorporation should be itemized, holistic, substantiated and verifiable - not the few language recordings at my phone or the few Ururogōri postings online that could be being phished out in the suspicion of things happening behind our backs or over our ignorance on tiktok.


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