Forget Terminator. This Nigerian philosopher is worried about the AI we already use

Growing up in Minna, North-Central Nigeria, Samuel Segun dreamed of building sci-fi robots. But after studying philosophy, his focus shifted from Terminator-style apocalypses to the immediate dangers of everyday algorithms. From developing Afro-ethical AI frameworks to crafting algorithmic auditing guidelines for INTERPOL and UNICRI, Segun tells JOHN ADOYI in this episode of My Life in Tech that the most urgent AI safety challenge is not a futuristic machine uprising, but fixing the systems running right now. Much of the world’s conversation about artificial intelligence (AI) safety begins with a question: what happens if the technology becomes too powerful for humans to control? Samuel Segun, an AI/ML product leader and AI safety researcher, was once interested in that question too. “When I wanted to do stuff around AI safety, I was more focused on the very existential part,” he says. “Things like AI systems taking over the world, things you find in Terminator and iRobot.” Then his research took him somewhere else. He began to see that some of AI’s most consequential problems were already here: algorithms that discriminate against minority communities, facial recognition systems t