Ministry of AI of Jamaica required, and why STEM schools without AI focus may not be sufficient

In November 2019, in response to growing automation, Prime Minister Andrew Holness announced the construction of six STEM schools in conjunction with China’s aid. STEM schools without focus on artificial intelligence (AI) may not be sufficient, because even STEM careers without AI focus are being automated away today. For example, there are smart apps that are better than humans at disease diagnosis.

As I came up with the idea of adding a minister of AI to Jamaica’s political portfolio some months ago, it was reassuring to later discover that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has had a minister of state of artificial intelligence since 2017, the first and only other nation with this portfolio to date. Jamaica is not as wealthy as the UAE, but the Caribbean nation is more than qualified, economically, to further make use of artificial intelligence. Take, for example, a single person from Japan utilising AI to increase profit at his parent’s cucumber farm.

A portfolio separate from the broad Ministry of Technology needs be created, so that individuals may take on pressing automation-based endeavours. The minister of AI of Jamaica should reasonably intimately understand how these smart applications work, and understand the implications of automation/ AI, and perform actions like pushing for facilities like Machine Learning Jamaica Institute to exist.

Jordan Micah Bennett is a AI software developer and author of the NVIDIA-featured, AI-based pothole detector.