The N3500 AI phone from Akwa Ibom and a lesson in thinking objectively.

About a month ago, while scrolling on Facebook, I stumbled upon an interview with a girl who claimed to have invented an “AI phone” in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria.

According to the young inventor, the phone was a screenless, voice-operated device that had a holographic display, a lie detector and a “tracker” that could give her the location of anyone in the world just by entering their IMEI number.

The most interesting part of it all was that the phone was available to buyers for just 3500 naira (around 3 USD).

Phone with Holographic display for 3500 naira?? I called cap immediately!

I rushed into the comments, eager to type “Y for whining”, my new catchphrase for calling out bogus claims. However, I was stunned to see the number of comments praising the girl and her invention and asking how they could get the IFIOK phone.

Not a single soul in the comments said, “Hold up! Smartphone for N3500?” No one asked what the hell an “AI phone” was in the first place. No one pointed out that the holographic display looked a little too sharp to be real or that the phone looked too much like a phone charger — the device literally had pins that would plug into a socket, but the inventor proudly showed them off as evidence that the phone had an inbuilt charger.

I found the commenters' naive interest in the phone amusing, so I sent the link to my friend Gideon (a.k.a. Lasgidi) expecting him to join in my amusement.

However, I was a bit disappointed by his response. Instead of joining me to have a laugh followed by a philosophical conversation about how easily people can be tricked into believing anything, he said, “All I can say is that girl will go far.”

“Go far keh?” I asked in my mind.

He asked why I thought the video was fake and concluded after listening to me go on for minutes about how unlikely it was — based on what I knew about how holographic technology was progressing — that a girl in Akwa Ibom (where there are no research or manufacturing labs) had done something that was such a leap from what companies with multi-million dollar research budgets were able to, that he didn’t have enough evidence to conclude if the phone was real or not. All he could say was that she was being interviewed by Mark Essien, so he could tell that the girl would go far in life.

This was definitely not how I thought this conversation would go.

“Who the hell is Mark Essien?” I asked, frustration beginning to affect my tone.

He explained that Mark Essien was one of the biggest Twitter Tech influencers in Africa and inferred that since he was the interviewer, there had to be something legit about the interviews.

As soon as he said it, I realised I was witnessing the manifestation of a cognitive bias.

Think of cognitive bias as a shortcut that the brain takes to process information quickly and make decisions without having to carefully analyze every detail. It’s like a mental trick our brains use, based on past experiences or emotions, to come to conclusions faster. However, these shortcuts can sometimes lead us to make judgments that might not be entirely accurate or logical.

The bias that my friend Gideon was manifesting is called authority bias, and as you can guess, this bias creates a tendency to have unreasonably high confidence in the information provided by people who seem like they know what they are talking about (a.k.a “experts”) instead of objectively looking at the facts ourselves.

Luckily for me, in the middle of the back and forth that we were having. I got a notification on my phone. I had shared the video earlier on Facebook with a caption saying “People will believe anything”. Retnan Daser, a Facebook friend and a software engineer who is active in the tech space had just dropped a comment on my post stating that Mark Essien had come out to clarify that the video was only a social experiment.

That was all of the evidence I needed! I presented it to Lasgidi and the case was closed.

Once we had agreed that the phone didn’t exist, we had a lengthy conversation about how we all are prone to authority bias. I mean, there was one time I believed Google was just months away from launching a technology that would allow me to send smells — like the smell of roses or party jollof rice — to users over the internet. Without any extra equipment! Even my dad, who didn’t have a background in science called cap, but I argued passionately because, after all, I had seen a promo video about it on Google’s official YouTube page so it had to be true. I would discover, to much disappointment in myself, that Google was only playing an April Fools’ Day prank on the world.

When I was writing this piece, I was stunned by a profound revelation — I too had been influenced by authority bias during my exchange with Lasgidi. As soon as Retnan mentioned that it was a social experiment, I didn’t bother to dig further or investigate. Retnan eats and breathes tech, so subconsciously, I assumed that anything he said needed no further investigation.

As I would find when I paused to do my research, it turns out Mark Essien didn’t intend for the video to be a social experiment. Mark’s words on X:

A lot of people have asked if the phone in the video is real. It is NOT real! This video use special effects (by Ekemini Maverick from Ikot Ekpene) to demonstrate Uyai’s idea of a phone she would like to build. It’s a demonstration of how good we have become in special effects. Uyai described her idea and Ekemini did the special effects. Hope you enjoyed our creation.

Realising that I too had been affected by the same bias I was trying to point out was very humbling. But why did I not realise that I too was being perhaps in my judgement? I did some research and it seems likely that I was manifesting a bias blind spot, an egocentric cognitive bias that makes us more likely to recognise the impact of biases on the judgment of others while failing to see the impact of biases on our judgments.

Pheeeeeew!

This incident and my interpretation of it is a reminder of how easily cognitive biases and fallacies can sneak up on us and prevent us from objectively assessing information and making sound judgments.

Everyone is prone to cognitive biases even though we are affected by different cognitive biases in different ways, but the knowledge can help us pause whenever we want to make important decisions to ask “what fallacies or biases could be affecting my decision?”