Page 17 - Service Delivery Review_Volume 14_Number 3_2022

Public Service Digital Skilling

Closing the Digital Gap

Closing the Gap is not a manifesto for digital justice in a dystopian post-Fourth Industrial Revolution
(4IR) society. Rather, the book is a teacher’s effort at closing the conceptual and knowledge gap that
is found woefully wanting from the humblest to the highest decision-making echelons of societies.

rofessor Tshilidzi Marwala is an engineer by training
and one of the world’s leading thinkers in the field
Pof Artificial Intelligence (AI). Yet despite a long list
of impeccable credentials in the “hard sciences”, he has
a breadth and depth of interests (from languages to phi-
losophy to philanthropy) that defies professional pigeon-
holing. Much of this comes together in his book Closing
the Gap. Currently Vice-Chancellor at the University of
Johannesburg, Professor Marwala is above all, a teacher
at heart.

Published in 2020, Closing the Gap was written out of on-
going concern over the widening digital divide between
the developed countries of the North and their developing
counterparts in the South, particularly the nations of the Af-
rican continent. Closing the Gap is not a manifesto for digi-
tal justice in a dystopian post-Fourth Industrial Revolution
(4IR) society. Rather, the book is a teacher’s effort at closing
the conceptual and knowledge gap that is found woefully
wanting from the humblest to the highest decision-making
echelons of societies.
In writing the book, Professor Marwala has two types of stu-
dents in mind. First, he identifies the need for leaders across
all sectors of society to have a more than passing inter-
Prof. Tshilidzi Marwala

est in technology and the impact of the Fourth Industrial
Revolution (4IR) on society. Second, he identifies a need
to prepare a new crop of technologically savvy leaders.
He argues for urgent interventions in how young people
are educated, urging that “instead of requiring students to
simply memorise facts, in the 4IR, we need them to de-
velop critical thinking … [and] systems thinking”.

The 4IR often assumes the status of a global fad, accom-
panied by the rise of (mis)information peddlers. Embold-
ened by a little knowledge from Google, there is often a
tendency to think that we know what it is all about. Or,
worse still, a common understanding of 4IR is lost and the
concept becomes incoherent as personal and ill-informed
whims take over.

Using the prism of AI, Closing the Gap pulls together many
different strands to simplify the complex and multi-dimen-
sional 4IR concept, conventionally defined as the “conflu-
ence of cyber, physical and biological technologies”. The
book’s expansive introduction provides explanatory notes
on the three preceding industrial revolutions. While a lot of

Volume 14 No.3 of 2022 | SERVICE DELIVERY REVIEW 17