Why you should embrace the age of AI
Don’t believe the doom and gloom. AI will be a potent equaliser
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
- Douglas Adams
Being a Debbie Downer about Artificial Intelligence (AI) may currently be in vogue, but outside of Western mainstream media and activism bubbles, there is a plethora of good news to celebrate.
Advancing agriculture
In countries like India, subsistence farmers have a hard life. They must contend with extreme weather and financial instability to support their families. My parents grew up in a village of rice farmers in rural Punjab, which they left behind in favour of menial labour offered to them in the UK. Factory work was preferable to them and enabled them to escape the poverty of agricultural work.
An initiative in India known as The AI for Agriculture Innovation, or Saagu Baagu locally, held workshops with Indian chilli farmers in the Khammam district to assess their needs and develop ways to meet them. As a result of the initiative, farmers were able to gain advice from AI bots, use AI-based quality testing, and access a digital platform to connect buyers and sellers. The initiative enabled farmers to use AI to increase crop yield, and a chatbot provided farmers with the information they needed to farm more effectively, for example, through mapping the maturity stages of their crops and testing soil, then recommending which fertilisers to use depending on the soil type.
Farmers who took part in the trial reported that they doubled their income thanks to these tools and attained a 21% increase in chilli yield production per acre. The advice the bots gave led to a reduction of pesticide use by 9% and fertilisers by 5%. Quality improvements also boosted unit prices by 8%. The Saagu Baagu trial was considered to be successful and is now expanding to other regions. This AI initiative is among many likely to revolutionise agriculture globally.
Advancing education
Gaining access to education is a potent equaliser, but providing schooling isn’t as easy as people tend to assume. When my parents left India for the UK and eventually accumulated wealth here, they decided to help set up a school for our relatives in their birth village in rural Punjab. I have visited this village more than once and seen that none of the children there could read or write. Whenever we visited, we would take them pencils, books and notepads so they could teach themselves where possible.
A little money in the West goes a long way in India, so many parents helped to set up a small building that could be used as a school, and offered funding for a relatively high salary for a teacher to work and live there. No one came forward. Educated Indians tend to leave the villages, as electricity is scarce, and health risks (like snake bites) are real. It requires at least four hours to get to the village from the nearest airport, mostly along dirt tracks without road infrastructure or signs. Finding the village requires knowledge of local taxi drivers, the family surname, and a bit of luck. The nearest hospital is several hours away.
What does this have to do with AI? Life is already changing for many people in low-income countries thanks to access to mobile phones and the Internet, but the fact that there is a wealth of available information does not mean that everyone can make use of it. That’s why it’s estimated that millions of people who speak uncommon languages will benefit from AI. This is where translation tools come into play - by combining large language models (LLM) with speech-recognition software, illiterate people can now access help to use websites for practical purposes, for example, to apply for government loans.
A global impact initiative named Karya aims to help rural Indians overcome language barriers relating to healthcare. Karya is collecting speech data on tuberculosis (TB), which is a deadly but mostly curable and preventable disease that kills roughly 200,000 Indians every year. By collecting voice recordings of 10 different dialects of Kannada, an AI speech model is being trained to communicate with local people. Tuberculosis carries a lot of stigma in India, which means that people are often reluctant to ask for help even when they think they may be suffering from symptoms of TB. By providing information in the languages people speak - since they use voice models - on a sensitive topic, AI will enable even illiterate people to reduce the spread of the disease with access to reliable, life-saving information.
Online tutoring can be useful for people who lack access to formal schooling, but it is often too expensive for people in lower-income countries who need it most. AI tools for education are likely to provide education in ways that previously haven’t been possible; for example, students in Kenya are eager to embrace AI through online learning as they believe it will lead to good careers.
Education and healthcare in the West could also benefit significantly from AI applications, where there are ongoing staffing shortages. In the US, text synthesis machines could help address the lack of teachers in K-12 education and the inaccessibility of health care for people on low incomes.
Advancing healthcare
Healthcare faces similar problems worldwide, including increasing costs and staff shortages. As developed economies now have rapidly growing elderly populations and shrinking workforces, this problem looks set to worsen. In Japan, AI is helping with an ageing population and shortage of care workers. Care homes use robots to patrol care homes, monitor patients and alert care workers when something is wrong. These bots use AI in myriad ways, including to detect abnormalities, assist with infection countermeasures by disinfecting commonly touched places, provide conversation, and carry people from wheelchairs to beds and bathing areas, which results in less physical exertion and fewer injuries for staff members.
Telemedicine is the remote diagnosis and treatment of patients through telecommunications technology. In Brazil, telemedicine was used widely during the pandemic, which led to more efficient health financing in the public sector, expanded medical care, and cost savings. Researchers in Brazil are now testing a medical AI that helps undertrained care workers treat patients.
Biometric data gathered from wearable devices will also be a game-changer where staff shortages are a problem. Collecting patient health data will provide more efficient care and save medical professionals time. Using wearables like Smartwatches, doctors can encourage and monitor patient adherence to treatments, help prevent illnesses and use data to spot patterns and make diagnoses. AI can detect cancers early, monitor infectious diseases and general health issues, and give patients more agency over their health where access to healthcare is limited or expensive.
In the medical arena, AI is already saving lives. Researchers found that using an AI tool called Mia has the potential to improve breast cancer screening by spotting potentially cancerous tissue that doctors miss. Mia could significantly increase the early detection of breast cancers in a European healthcare setting by up to 13%. Current estimates are that about 20% of breast cancers are missed by specialist doctors.
Advancing energy
Fusion energy is the process that powers the sun and other stars, but scientists have yet to be able to replicate it. Fusion would provide us with a near-limitless source of clean energy, but so far, scientists have only been able to sustain it for a few seconds.
One of the challenges of mastering fusion energy is controlling and containing plasma. Researchers recently found a way to use AI to combat this previously insurmountable problem, which is a step forward for nuclear fusion.
Also, AI is helping to bring down the costs of nuclear fission. Blue Wave AI Labs has successfully deployed machine learning tools at two nuclear power plants by studying reactor operating behaviour and forecasting products into the fuel-cycle design and management processes. AI has saved the operating company millions of dollars per reactor each year. Blue Wave projects that the new software could save up to $80 million annually once the tools are expanded to the country’s 32 boiling water reactors.
Predicting the future
Machine learning models have already improved weather forecasting - DeepMind AI has been found to accurately predict the weather worldwide more precisely and quickly than conventional methods.
AI is also already playing a role in alerting us to natural disasters by predicting how many earthquake aftershocks will strike and their strength. These models, which have been trained on large data sets of seismic events, have also been found to estimate the number of aftershocks better than conventional models.
Forecasting models can help to predict other natural disasters like severe storms, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. Machine learning uses algorithms to reduce the time required to make forecasts and increase model accuracy, which again is superior to the non AI-models that are currently being used for this purpose.
For many years, scientists have been using machine-learning strategies to improve climate modelling, making it faster, reducing energy costs, and improving accuracy. In the words of climate scientist Tapio Schneider, “Machine learning makes this science a lot more fun”.
Reducing digital poverty
Digital poverty extends beyond simple access to the Internet. To take advantage of online opportunities, people who speak uncommon languages or are illiterate need to be able to access educational materials, apply for jobs, access healthcare information, and connect with loved ones.
In the West, much of the fear of AI is based on how quickly it is being implemented, but for many countries, this speed is a boon. 24% of people in developing countries use the mobile Internet for educational purposes, compared with only 12% in the wealthiest countries.
Remember the technology panic about mobile phone? Yet its rapid spread has been a great equaliser. A study that examined the contribution of mobile phones to rural livelihoods and poverty reduction in the Morogoro region, Tanzania, found that:
Mobile phones contribute to reduce poverty and improve rural livelihoods by expanding and strengthening social networks; increase people's ability to deal with emergencies; cut down travel costs; maximise the outcomes of necessary journeys; increase temporal accessibility; and amplify efficiency of activities. The use of mobile phones also reduces costs of doing business and increases productivity by helping rural traders and farmers to secure better markets and prices; and promptly communicate business-related information.
In 2000, only 4% of people in low- and middle-income countries had access to mobile phones, but by 2015, 94% had access. This includes sub-Saharan Africa. In India, increased mobile phone use has strengthened GDP. In rural Peru, household consumption rose by 11% with phone access, while extreme poverty was reduced by 5.4%. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most prominent is access to banking apps. A study found that almost 1 in 10 Kenyan families living in extreme poverty could lift their incomes above the poverty line using the banking app M-Pesa.
Historically, many technologies have taken over 50 years to reach most countries, but since AI only requires access to a mobile phone, which one-third of the world’s population already has, it should spread more rapidly in the countries that need the technology the most.
There are challenges. Although countries in sub-Saharan Africa will theoretically gain the most from AI, the technology will spread more slowly there than elsewhere due to a lack of connectivity and governance. Electricity infrastructure will be necessary: people in lower-income countries need access to cheap, reliable energy to share the benefits of all new technologies, not just AI.
Advancing forward
As with all technology, AI will have some downsides. A valid concern is that AI tools will replace some people’s jobs in the short-term. New jobs will be created, but the period of change will be uncomfortable. Thankfully, it is likely to be a steady change - more of an evolution rather than a revolution. Besides, the outcome should be worth it.
We are a technological species. Too often, we hear eldritch tales about supposedly sinister new technologies. This is true whether we’re talking about the printed word (Socrates didn’t like it), books (Cicero had negative opinions), electricity, the microwave oven, the pen, or myriad other discoveries that have caused technology panics but have had immense benefits for humankind. While some of these concerns made valid points, many are risible in hindsight (sorry, Socrates and Cicero). Technology is a human appendage, not an adversary; we have continually evolved alongside it. AI is already doing good, sometimes in subtle ways (like making the London Tube safer) and increasingly in life-saving ways as outlined in this article.
Think of all the regions of the world where children lack access to education, school teachers are scarce, and opportunities for adult learning are scant. AI is going to change lives for the better.
Think of the preventable diseases that are untreated due to a lack of information, stigma, and a shortage of healthcare providers, and how many lives will be improved and saved by overcoming these challenges. This is already changing in some of the poorest regions of the world.
Think of all the jobs at home that people don’t want to do, the menial labour that can be replaced by AI that will, in turn, create new and more fulfilling jobs for people.
This is what we should discuss - not a doom-and-gloom technology panic, but a potent technological age of equality - a boon, and soon.
This was a great post. It’s helpful to hear about the specific impacts AI has in peoples’ lives rather than hear brush off comments like, “Don’t get me wrong AI can do a lot of good, but. . .” It’s like with nuclear energy when for decades society talked about the risk to the right of the decimal point instead of the benefits to the left of it. Not immediately, but I’ve come to think of AI in a similar way. This post just sealed the deal.
Most in the West truly don't understand third-world poverty. Thanks for your international perspective.