MBEHI: Polymaths not specialists needed in era of AI for human progress

Human lives and societies can be transformed by religions, wars, cultural shifts, the passion and belief of a single great man or woman and the imposition of new economic systems.

But when profound and lasting change takes place, it is usually because we found a new way of doing things - a new technology. These technological inventions have long served as the yardstick by which a society measures its progress.

At their core, they reshape how humans meet their most basic needs, making it easier, more efficient and less energy-intensive to get food, shelter and to procreate.

So profound is their impact on history that entire periods are named after their defining technologies - the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age  and now, the Artificial Intelligence age.

The first technological revolution in the Neolithic Age was the plough, which mechanised farming and birthed the Agrarian Revolution.

It created food security and freed humanity from spending all her energy hunting and gathering, thus enabling people to settle, specialise in crafts and build complex societies.

The second was the steam engine, which ushered in the Industrial Revolution and enabled production at scale using machines rather than human muscle.

Then came the Information Age, powered by microchips that sparked the personal computer and internet revolutions and gave rise to a global digital economy that swiftly outpaced the physical economy in economic output.

Now we're entering Digital 2.0, driven by AI and powered by GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). Its key distinction from Digital 1.0 is that it substitutes machine intelligence for human intelligence in producing goods and services.

With these technological inventions happening rapidly, it is easy to overlook the fact that every single one of them was started not by governments or corporate giants but by a handful of extraordinary individuals in society.

They’ve been called different names during different eras — from geniuses, to inventors, to innovators and more recently entrepreneurs. I prefer to call them polymaths.

A polymath is a person with exceptionally broad knowledge and deep expertise spanning multiple, often unrelated, fields or disciplines.

The word originates from the Greek for "having learned much." These individuals are defined by an immense curiosity and a rare ability to synthesise knowledge across diverse subjects to produce entirely new innovations.

Plato understood philosophy, mathematics, politics and metaphysics, and established one of the earliest centres of structured learning through his Academy — one of the world's first institutions of higher learning.

Thomas Edison was a polymath who worked across engineering, chemistry and business, holding more than 1,000 patents and pioneering not just inventions like the lightbulb but also entire systems such as electric power distribution that transformed how society functions.

In Senegal, the great Cheikh Anta Diop, described as a "modern Pharaoh of knowledge", held expertise in physics, Egyptology, linguistics, anthropology and history.

Besides polymathy, the common factor amongst all these individuals is the fact that their careers weren’t conventional. Their work was less about trading their labour in exchange for pay and more about thinking deeply of innovative solutions to societal problems.

They were funded by kings, governments, aristocrats and the church, and their successes often came much later after a series of failures.

Their goal was not primarily to make money. It was to solve a deep, consequential problem that, once solved, would push all of society forward.

It was others who commercialised their discoveries and created enormous wealth in the process. James Watt invented the steam engine, but it was entrepreneurs like Matthew Boulton who manufactured and sold it across Britain, transforming entire industries. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and gave it freely to the world.

It was companies such as Google, Amazon and Meta that turned that gift into trillion-dollar businesses. The mobile money technology underpinning M-Pesa was developed by researchers at Vodafone's R&D unit, but it was Safaricom's commercial execution of it in Kenya that made it the most transformative financial tool in African history.

AI is accelerating all of this. As it progressively replaces specialised labour as a factor of production - enabling individuals to build products, write code, analyse data and design systems without needing to have a tech or engineering background -  the educational and professional premium will shift decisively.

The competitive edge in the labour market of tomorrow will not be deep expertise in a single subject. It will be the ability to hold a broad knowledge base, draw cross-disciplinary insights and apply creative insights to complex problems.

The education system will follow. Curricula built around narrow specialisation will be disrupted just as surely as the industries they once fed and with it, an incentive for learners, innovators and professionals to pursue polymathy.

The writer is founder of M-Taji and Chairman of Mashinani Youth Kazi Delivery Movement [email protected]