Morocco and AI Illiteracy — Part I: The Cost of Staying Behind

One of the things that got me to pursue my passion for artificial intelligence was something Andrew Ng said in 2017: “AI is the new electricity.”

You might read it as another quote on the internet. But the more applications I see, the harder it becomes to treat AI as a subject we can leave to a few specialists somewhere else. For us in Morocco, I think the question is becoming urgent: who will understand the systems we are going to use?

I worry about what happens when a technology reaches people before the education needed to question it does. A fabricated video of a leader saying something inflammatory could cause harm before people have a chance to establish whether it is real. Learning how these systems work will not make every deception obvious. It would at least give people reasons to question what they are shown, rather than treating the image itself as proof.

That is one reason I want AI education to reach beyond the students who already know they want a technical career. Start with computer science in school. Give young people a way into the subject, and help the public understand both its possibilities and its dangers. We should not wait until someone is choosing a university specialization to let them discover that this work exists.

But awareness alone will not give Morocco the expertise to build and evaluate its own systems. Students who want to go further need teaching, resources, and support. Otherwise, buying a finished product from abroad may become the easier option every time, including when we lack the people needed to judge whether it fits our needs.

Buying technology is not itself the problem. Depending on it without understanding it is what worries me. Who can check the data? Who can challenge a result? Who can change the system when the people using it need something different?

I don’t want AI to become one more field that young Moroccans encounter mainly through products they are expected to consume. I want them to have a chance to enter it, question it, and make something of their own. That chance needs support before the need becomes impossible to ignore.