What ancestral intelligence can teach us about AI | Nanjira Sambuli

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Ubuntu is a foundational philosophy rooted in South Africa, but practiced widely across the African continent that emphasizes interconnectedness, community, and the collective well-being of society as the basis for our moral compass. But what does this philosophical practice have to do with artificial intelligence? In this talk, tech policy visionary Nanjira Zambouli uses the principles of Ubuntu to imagine a world where AI can be both ethical and inclusive.

0:54What can the African savannah teach us about AI? Take this journey with me. Across Africa, proverbs are a cornerstone of the oral tradition through which indigenous knowledge and wisdom has been passed down from generation to generation. The Yoruba people of Nigeria say that a proverb is the horse that can carry one swiftly to the discovery of ideas. One of my favorite proverbs says, when elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers. And it has guided me in making sense of much in the world today, especially with all the developments in AI. The elephants can symbolize great powers, be they nation-states, corporations, broligarchies, while the grass comprises people, geographies and ecologies considered resources to exploit, wastelands or charity cases.

1:51Great power competition, as we're living through today, emphasizes the power of the metaphorical elephants in their quest for dominance over resources, ideas and innovations. In the case of Africa, not only are we caught in the middle, but we comprise a key battleground over which elephants are fighting over natural and human resources to power the intelligent age. Meanwhile, our perspectives and ambitions tend to be drowned out by the din of the elephants. But what can we discover when we look past the elephants fighting and zoom in on the grass? Well, for one, we can learn a simple yet profound concept.

2:31I am because you are. This sums up a set of value systems that emerged among the Bantu people of Africa and is known as Utu in Eastern Africa and Ubuntu in Southern Africa. Utu and Ubuntu instill in us a profound appreciation of humanity as a quality we owe one another. And it's not just about the relationship between humans. Ubuntu is also about our relationship with nature, and the spiritual or cosmic. Ubuntu reminds us we ought to be developing technologies like AI for the benefit of all of humanity and our ecology. Across Africa, we have exciting examples of embracing the wisdom of Ubuntu to inform data governance, AI product design, and community building.

3:22I call it Ubuntu. AI development today treats data as if it's an abundant natural resource. And we hear this in sayings like, data is the new oil. But already the limits of this paradigm are being realized, as researchers have been sounding the alarm that high-quality data to train AI models is drying up. Through Ubuntu, we conceptualize data differently. And we appreciate that it represents lives, cultures, and communities. so that data governance for us is about the meaningful participation, informed consent, self-determination, and community ownership of data sets from which language, nature-based knowledge, and indigenous wisdom are derived.

4:10Thank you. And this has inspired a concept like data justice in our African policy frameworks. Data justice matters because it means that rural women in Africa, for example, who possess unique knowledge about agriculture, food production, medicine, and environmental protection are represented and visible in data systems and agritech solutions. Then, when we've been told ours are low-resource languages, we're resourcing our languages. Conventional AI wisdom demands large language models. but African practitioners are making do with little language models. Driven by efficiency as a core value and inspired by our relation to nature, initiatives like LELAPA AI have developed lightweight African language models that are serving our communities without requiring extensive resources.

5:11Their INKUBA small language model has been inspired by the dung beetle, which can roll up to 250 times its body weight. It's small, but mighty. Incubar is trained on 0.4 billion parameters and outperforms larger models in sentiment analysis and displays remarkable consistency across multiple languages. We're also building collaborative AI communities. We have Masahane, all building together across over 30 African countries to strengthen natural language processing in our research. And this grassroots organizing approach has set out to demonstrate that low-resourceness of languages is not a data problem, but a societal one best solved through participation.

6:00In fact, Masahani have developed a non-traditional authorship model that acknowledges and includes all contributors in published papers, be it that you contributed data, lived experience, coded software, or coordinated research participation. And this way, they've been able to publish translation results for over 38 African languages. These examples of Ubuntu are our way of charting an alternative path to developing and deploying AI solutions in Africa, by Africa, and beneficial for Africa. Ubuntu matters for a number of reasons. For one, we are a setting agency to conceive and build AI futures beyond just the ambition of the metaphorical elephants and to contribute to a global commons.

6:51It also allows us to bring forward the indigenous wisdom of our ancestors so that Ubuntu is artificial intelligence powered by ancestral intelligence.

7:08And we also get to remind the elephants, they may fight and will their might all they want, but they're also bound to suffer if they trample upon the grass to the point of irreparable damage or extinction. But when their power is exercised in relation to others, it makes them ecosystem engineers and redirects their energy towards helping sustain a healthy and beneficial environment for everyone. And we see this in the savannah. When African elephants leverage their power to trample upon dense shrubs and occasion trees, they make room for smaller species to coexist. When they disperse seeds as they trek across the land, they help generate new growth and maintain the biodiversity of the savannah ecosystem.

7:54So, in relationality, in coexistence, The power of the elephants is majestic, and it's a life force for themselves, other wildlife and the savannah ecosystem. I believe if we can reimagine humanity beyond just the ambition of the metaphorical elephants, we can realize a world that benefits everyone. So I implore all of you, take heed of the grass beneath your feet. Our collective future depends on it. Asante.

8:34That was Nanjira Sambouli speaking at TED 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faze Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.