Once upon a time, students had to work out math problems the old-fashioned way, using pencil and paper and low-tech slide rules instead of calculators, computers and smartphones.

Today, if we lose online connectivity or even if we lose electricity, the entire world stops working. Stores must close their doors because cashiers are lost without their intelligent cash registers that compute change and print receipts.

Without TSTT and T&TEC life as we know it would cease to exist. Artificial intelligence (AI) will further exacerbate the lack of primary education as students grow up in a world where AI will tell them what to think and do, requiring no critical thinking skills.

But Planning and Development Minister Penelope Beckles told the Big Data Forum last week that TT is ready, willing and able to compete in the digital world by utilising AI to improve, among other things, governance and services.

This was told to an audience of technologists and AI and data corporate heads, who, no doubt, were salivating to sell us billions of dollars in software and hardware with the debacle of TSTT and other major corporations’ blood-letting fresh in their minds.

I have no problem with improving governance by replacing ministers who do nothing constructive except spend the people’s money on high-pitched sales schemes pushed by mega-corporations like Microsoft, Google and Alphabet, among others.

However, none of it is accurate. The promise of AI is a gimmickry concept these corporations hope to cash in on before the world gets wise to the fraud they perpetrate on unsuspecting politicians who buy it hook, line and sinker.

But when you throw some high-tech buzzwords, such as the AI chatbot, ChatGPT, and big data analytics, at politicians, they repeat it to an unsuspecting public without quite knowing what it all means; they regurgitate technical jargon, and away goes our forex to overseas corporations that celebrate another multi-million-dollar sale in their accounts, aided and abetted by binding contracts that will tie us to the big data service companies for all eternity.

A case in point is our billion-dollar contract with desalination plants in a country where perfectly potable groundwater lies beneath our feet. Still, we were sold a bill of goods that desalination would be our salvation. It wasn’t then and still is not these many years later.

While big data corporations can dazzle the Trini politicians with charts and fancy presentations, tableau.com inadvertently revealed their actual plan: “Big data analytics describes the process of uncovering trends, patterns and correlations in large amounts of raw input to help make data-informed decisions. These processes use familiar statistical analysis techniques – like clustering and regression – and apply them to more extensive data sets with the help of newer tools.”

This means they sell us a basic AI package for a few million US dollars, and once we are hooked we will need to upgrade to their premier package, costing millions more, to make sense of all that raw data. But by then the PNM will be kicked out of office for its lack of foresight and wanton wastage, and the UNC or whoever takes over will dump the billion-dollar AI/big data debacle and start from scratch. Isn’t that what we have come to expect from politicians in this nation of political misfits?

Moreover, everything AI claims to accomplish has been around in database technology for over half a century. “Oracle Database has been a leading enterprise database management system for over three decades. Despite the emergence of new technologies and competitors, Oracle Database remains a popular choice for organisations across industries” – linkedin.com.

We are urged to spend taxpayers’ forex to embrace AI. Minister Beckles said “mobile connections stood at 1.89 million” users. That statement is ludicrous and does not give the complete picture of the intelligent use of data since cell phones, streaming videos, smart TVs and computers are all data-intensive. Furthermore, any money spent on AI to improve our productivity and governance will be wasted, not unlike the desalination forex we spend annually to produce water from salinised water. Meanwhile, perfectly good rainwater washes out to sea.

In conclusion, AI is not just redundant technology; it does nothing to fix the security breaches we have been experiencing. But politicians jump on it to look like they are savvy about technology when it shows the opposite. Why not fix data security as a first step and end this flirtation with exotic tools we do not need and can ill afford?

REX CHOOKOLINGO