On the 4th and 5th of December 2015, Mascot Information and Technology Solutions held the maiden edition of Nigeria ICT Fest at Magrellos, Festac Town, Lagos, and Radisson Blu Anchorage Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos. The focus of the event was to discuss bridging the technology gap between Nigeria and the developed world.
International speakers at the event included Micah Redding, an American software developer and IEET contributing writer, and Mira Kwak, a South-Korean artificial intelligence researcher. Others included IEET Executive Director and fellows Dr. James Hughes, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Dr. Ben Goertzel and Dr. Natasha Vita-More respectively.
Micah Redding spoke on the first day on the topic: Christianity, Emerging Technologies And The Developing World — Nigeria’s Role In Humanity’s Future. He challenged the view that Christians are not supposed to be actively involved in society and he went on to differentiate between vertical and horizontal development, clarifying that vertical development refers to developments that are revolutionary while horizontal developments refer to improvements on existing technologies.
On day 2, Mira Kwak, an AI researcher from Seoul spoke on how to be a leading country by and in ICT. Kwak explained how Nigerian culture can be portrayed positively to the international community – “advantages to latecomers in the developing world is that they can: grow faster than developed countries, avoid trial and error, achieve technological and industrial upgrading and redesign current technologies and solve current ICT problems.”
Event organisers Agbolade Omowole, Imolode Michael and Ayemhere Aidaghese then explained the need for awareness on increasing life expectancy in Nigeria with technology, citing the fact that the average life expectancy in Nigeria is relatively low at 52 years compared to that of Japan at 83 and Western Europe at 81.
Acknowledged researchers such as Dr. Aubrey de Grey (British Gerontologist and Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation), Dr. James Hughes (Executive Director, IEET)), Dr. Ilia Stambler (Israeli researcher on ageing and Affiliate Scholar with IEET) and Dr. Ben Goertzel spoke extensively on ageing, regenerative medicine, techno-progressivism and artificial general intelligence amongst other topics.
Eray Ozkural, a computer scientist from Turkey, while speaking on post-scarcity economy and singularity cranes, noted that it is imperative for Nigeria to manufacture its own chips to get up to speed with the developed world. Loredana Terec Vlad, a researcher at Lumen Research Center in Humanistic and Social Sciences, discussed transhumanism, posthumanism and the ethics surrounding their application.
Nigerian speakers at the event included sport journalist and presenter Olaleye Dada, motivational speaker and businessman Abiodun Mabadeje and award winning journalist Kehinde Ajose. Mr. Godwin Anyebe, Odia Patricia, and Kehinde Ajose served as the panelists.
Noting the need for Nigeria to catch up with developing countries, Agbolade Omowole remarked,
“We are about to witness a technology explosion and it is important for countries of the world to grow together to ensure that these technologies are affordable and available to everyone regardless of geographical regions and size of bank account.”