Ghana finance minister Forson made acting defence minister after fatal crash
The helicopter was flying to gold-mining town Obuasi with five officials — including defence minister Edward Omane Boamah and environment, science & technology minister Ibrahim Murtala Muhammed — and three airforce crew on board when it crashed.
None survived. Ghanaian authorities did not immediately give an explanation for what might have caused the crash.
Forson was tapped to serve as finance minister in January after Mahama returned to power.
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Mail & Guardian
a day ago
- Mail & Guardian
AI Armageddon is coming. Why aren't we panicking?
Artificial intelligence will replace most jobs and create few. The future is bleak – except for the rich. (Science Photo Library/ Sergi Laremenko) For the past few months, I've been experimenting with OpenAI's ChatGPT o3 and 4.5 advanced reasoning models. The difference between these models and ChatGPT 3 is astounding. Grok 4, despite its infamous 'MechaNazi' moments, is utterly incredible. With the right prompts, AI can do your taxes, respond to your emails, increase the efficiency of academic research and create deep fakes so realistic they're almost indistinguishable from reality (and soon will be). They are imperfect. ChatGPT remains a terrible philosopher when left to its own devices, but this is just the beginning. As AI models learn to train and improve themselves, the improvements will become exponential. AI super-intelligence is just around the corner — intelligence that far surpasses the capabilities of human beings. This is not science fiction. It's real, and it's now. AI models will go from what we have now to having capacities we can only imagine, over just a period of months. AI will probably become a better, faster, cheaper architect than any human. It will render administrators, assistants, paralegals, data inputters, most programmers, most chemists, physicists and actuaries redundant. It will create artworks, novels and music in minutes. There will be AI teachers that can interact with students in a deeply personalised way. There's a good chance they'll be just as effective as real teachers. They'll make no mistakes, and everyone gets one-on-one tuition at a fraction of the cost. Most research and development will be outsourced to the far more capable AIs. This might have some benefits. Energy prices could tend to zero as AI discovers increasingly efficient means of energy production. AI in healthcare will enable us to predict pathologies years in advance, provide flawless diagnoses and personalised treatment plans, and help develop gene editing and other new forms of treatment. But the potential cost of all this is unimaginably awful, unless AI development is strictly regulated — and this seems very unlikely in the current political environment. The first hint of the negative effects of AI will be an uptick in unemployment, as companies around the world (mainly in the West at first) start replacing the intellectual workforce with AI. I think we're already seeing this (in its infancy). The revisions in the US job report this month might be a partial reflection of that. But over the next few years, there's a good chance unemployment becomes a genuine global crisis. What happens then? Well, those left without jobs will be unable to pay their bonds on the properties they bought in the midst of a property bubble. They'll go into negative equity, have their houses repossessed and be plunged into debt and bankruptcy. Demand for property will slump, and property prices will crash. In the West, a huge percentage of people's wealth is tied up in property, so this inevitably leads to a global financial crisis. The response to arguments like this often runs as follows: this is no different from the industrial revolution. New jobs will be created, and it will lead to progress. But I think this is a disanalogy. The industrial revolution targeted physical labour. We still had intellectual labour to fall back on. The AI revolution takes away intellectual labour. Although it's no doubt true that a few jobs will be created, where people specialise in applying AI technologies, these will be few and far between relative to the jobs lost. I just don't see it. When the truck-driver or taxi-driver's job is taken by an autonomous vehicle, is that person meant to become an AI entrepreneur? This response is detached from reality. South Africa is used to unemployment. To mitigate the risk of unemployment, students come to universities to get degrees, improving their chances of employment. But once intellectual labour is replaced by AI, many of the degrees aren't going to help. Many potential students will probably choose not to go. But without students, universities collapse. Without universities, the skill-set and critical thinking capacities of a population drop, and without critical thinking capacities, we become more vulnerable to political manipulation through AI-driven social media platforms and deep fakes. In addition, there's little stopping people from using AI to target the banking system, design killer viruses or infiltrate the Pentagon to start a nuclear war — truly the stuff of Armageddon movies. Right now the global political leadership is devoid of a moral backbone. In exchange for political funding and (at least in Donald Trump's case) removing 'woke content', Big Tech companies are given the freedom to fight the AI arms race almost unregulated. Super-intelligence will come so fast that society has no time to adjust. This is in the politicians' interests, because they can use this technology to manipulate the electorate. Everyone with spare capital is throwing their money into NVIDIA and other AI-related stocks, delighted to see their portfolios skyrocket. But we're not seeing the bigger picture. Sam Altman — chief executive of OpenAI — is. He's established 'Worldcoin', a system linking crypto to biometric identity, with the main purpose of facilitating universal basic income. Essentially, he's planning to further profit from the quasi-Marxist dystopia his company is driving us towards. If the guy driving OpenAI is envisioning a world where UBI becomes a global necessity, why aren't we more worried? Generally I'm a positive chap. I want to believe AI technology will be progressive. I'm sure universities will adapt and drive courses focused on critical thinking and other skills needed in this new world. Further, if AI can help us produce power basically for free, and use robots for all physical labour and AI for all intellectual labour, there's a conceivable reality where nobody has to work, and our physical and psychological needs can be met with no money at all. But we live in a capitalist world led by people like Trump. OpenAI started as a nonprofit, open platform. That has changed. Profit matters more to Big Tech than population wellbeing. Sure, AI will lead to incredible advances in medical technologies — but who will see these benefits? My guess is the rich, and the rich alone. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems to me that a truly dystopian future might be right in front of us, and nobody is doing anything about it. There is no #juststopAI movement. Demands for global regulation exist, but they're not mainstream. Where are the marches? Where are the protests? Why are we not putting pressure on our politicians to be more responsible? I urge you to consider what your plan will be in this new AI world. Choose your degrees wisely. Equip yourselves with critical thinking skills (I recommend philosophy!), learn how to use AI technologies (that should help, at least for a while), or consider industries where the labour force is less likely to be affected (such as health and basic education). Good luck, everyone. Professor Benjamin Smart is a director at the Centre for Philosophy of Epidemiology, Medicine and Public Health at the University of Johannesburg.
TimesLIVE
3 days ago
- TimesLIVE
Ghana finance minister Forson made acting defence minister after fatal crash
Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama has asked finance minister Cassiel Ato Forson to also act as defence minister after a military helicopter crash in which the defence minister was among those killed, the president's office said on Thursday. The helicopter was flying to gold-mining town Obuasi with five officials — including defence minister Edward Omane Boamah and environment, science & technology minister Ibrahim Murtala Muhammed — and three airforce crew on board when it crashed. None survived. Ghanaian authorities did not immediately give an explanation for what might have caused the crash. Forson was tapped to serve as finance minister in January after Mahama returned to power.
The Citizen
4 days ago
- The Citizen
Two Ghana ministers killed in helicopter crash
Ghana's defence and environment ministers were killed in a military helicopter crash en route to a mining-related event. Ghana's defence and environment ministers were killed in a military helicopter crash Wednesday, the presidency said, after the air force chopper carrying three crew and five passengers came down in a forest in the south. Television station Joy News broadcast cell phone footage from the crash scene showing smouldering wreckage in a heavily forested area earlier in the day, before it was revealed that ministers Edward Omane Boamah and Ibrahim Murtala Muhammed were among the dead. Boamah became President John Mahama's defence minister shortly after Mahama's swearing-in in January. Muhammed, 50, was serving as the minister of environment, science and technology. He had been scheduled to attend the UN talks currently underway in Geneva aimed at hammering out a landmark global treaty on combating the scourge of plastic pollution. ALSO READ: Businessman steps in to clarify helipad saga Ghanaian media reported that the helicopter was on its way to an event on illegal mining — a major environmental issue in the west African country. Everyone on board was killed in the accident in the southern Ashanti region, authorities said. 'The president and government extend our condolences and sympathies to the families of our comrades and the servicemen who died in service to the country,' said Mahama's chief of staff Julius Debrah. The Ghanaian Armed Forces said investigations had been launched to determine the cause of the crash of the Z9 helicopter. The military had reported earlier Wednesday that an air force helicopter had dropped off the radar after taking off from Accra just after 9:00 am local time (0900 GMT). It had been headed towards the town of Obuasi, northwest of the capital. ALSO READ: Siemens executive, family among six killed in New York helicopter crash Ministers' challenges Alhaji Muniru Mohammed, Ghana's deputy national security coordinator and former agriculture minister, was also among the dead, along with Samuel Sarpong, vice chairman of Mahama's National Democratic Congress party. Boamah was leading Ghana's defence ministry at a time when jihadist activity across its northern border in Burkina Faso has become increasingly volatile. While Ghana has so far avoided a jihadist spillover from the Sahel — unlike neighbours Togo and Benin — observers have warned of increased arms trafficking and of militants from Burkina Faso crossing the porous border to use Ghana as a rear base. A medical doctor by training, Boamah's career in government included stints as communications minister during Mahama's previous 2012-2017 tenure. Before that, he was the deputy minister for environment. Muhammed, the environment minister, was at the helm as the country battles illegal, informal gold mining that has ravaged farmlands and contaminated water. ALSO READ: Investigators recover plane black boxes from Washington air collision 'Galamsey', as the practice is locally known, has been threatening cocoa production in particular and became a major issue in the election that saw Mahama elected last year. The establishment earlier this year of the Ghana Gold Board and the banning of foreigners from the local gold trade were seen as the first concrete signs of a crackdown on the practice by the new administration. Muhammed was a 'committed environmentalist' and 'deeply respected' by peers in Africa and globally, said UNEP Executive director Inger Andersen in Geneva, in a statement. Only a few weeks ago the minister was elected to be a member of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) in Nairobi, said Andersen. Condolence messages also came from the ECOWAS and Africa Union chiefs. ALSO READ: Bodies pulled from Washington river after plane collides with helicopter Regional tensions Boamah led a delegation to Ouagadougou in May as Ghana pursued increased diplomacy with Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — all ruled by juntas who have broken with the west African regional bloc ECOWAS. He had been set to release a book titled 'A Peaceful Man in an African Democracy', about former president John Atta Mills, who died in 2012. President Mahama suspended all his scheduled activities for the rest of the week and declared three days of mourning starting Thursday with all flags to be flown at half-mast, his office said. – By: © Agence France-Presse
