This year marks the third year that the SingularityU South Africa Summit will be held. I will be the first to admit that I had no idea what to expect when I rolled through to the media launch at the fancy Marble restaurant in Rosebank.
The theme for this year is: Future Proof Africa. Mic Mann, who is the co-CEO of SingularityU South Africa explained: “As part of our mission to future proof Africa, we are focussing on the most pressing problems and the technologies that can help address these. Innovation holds the key to the exponential solutions that can solve our education, energy, poverty & water challenges.”
But I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t all about technology. As someone put it: “it’s not about tech, it’s about where we are going and what we can do with it.”
In short, how can we use technology to better humanity?
Attempts at answering this question will come in the form of the Summit which will be held on 16 and 17 October at Kyalami Theatre on the Track in Johannesburg. Standard tickets are R18 500 and you can expect to see a myriad of speakers.
They include Suzanne Gildert, who “co-founded Sanctuary AI, with a mission to build synthetic humans (and) will discuss how we will have robots that will look like us and assist in the future will help us be more human.” Another speaker is Sivan Ya’ari, who is “the driving force behind InnoAfrica, which has supplied over 1 million people in rural areas in Africa with clean drinking water, using solar power, after identifying the need for a more sustainable energy solution.”
More speakers will be announced. Visit singularityusouthafricasummit.org for more info