AI Is a Great Equalizer That Will Change the World

A positive revolution from AI is already unfolding in the global East and South.

Zion Lights — Mar 22, 2024

Summary: Concerns over potential negative impacts of AI have dominated headlines, particularly regarding its threat to employment. However, a closer examination reveals AI’s immense potential to revolutionize equal and high quality access to necessities such as education and healthcare, particularly in regions with limited access to resources. From India’s agricultural advancements to Kenya’s educational support, AI initiatives are already transforming lives and addressing societal needs.

The latest technology panic is over artificial intelligence (AI). The media is focused on the negatives of AI, making many assumptions about how AI will doom us all. One concern is that AI tools will replace workers and cause mass unemployment. This is likely overblown—although some jobs will be lost to AI, if history is any guide, new jobs will be created. Furthermore, AI’s ability to replace skilled labor is also one of its greatest potential benefits.

Think of all the regions of the world where children lack access to education, where schoolteachers are scarce and opportunities for adult learning are scant.

Think of the preventable diseases that are untreated due to a lack of information, the dearth of health care providers, and how many lives could be improved and saved by overcoming these challenges.

In many ways, AI will be a revolutionary equalizer for poorer countries where education and health care have historically faced many challenges. In fact, a positive revolution from AI is already unfolding in the global East and South.

Improving Equality through Education and Health Care

In India, agricultural technology startup Saagu Baagu is already improving lives. This initiative allows farmers to increase crop yield through AI-based solutions. A chatbot provides farmers with the information they need to farm more effectively (e.g., through mapping the maturity stages of their crops and testing soil so that AI can make recommendations on which fertilizers to use depending on the type of soil). Saagu Baagu has been successful in the trial region and is now being expanded. This AI initiative is likely to revolutionize agriculture globally.

Combining large language models with speech-recognition software is helping Indian farmers in other ways. For example, Indian global impact initiative Karya is working on helping rural Indians, who speak many different languages, to overcome language barriers. Karya is collecting data on tuberculosis, which is a 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 much stigma in India, so people are often reluctant to ask for help. AI will allow Indians to reduce the spread of the disease and give them access to reliable information.

In Kenya, where students are leading in AI use, the technology is aiding the spread of information by allowing pupils to ask a chatbot questions about their homework.

Throughout the world, there are many challenges pertaining to health care, including increasing costs and staff shortages. As developed economies now have rapidly growing elderly populations and shrinking workforces, the problem is set to worsen. In Japan, AI is helping with the aging population issue, where a shortage of care workers is remedied by using robots to patrol care homes to monitor patients and alert care workers when something is wrong. These bots use AI to detect abnormalities, assist in infection countermeasures by disinfecting commonly touched places, provide conversation, and carry people from wheelchairs to beds and bathing areas, which means less physical exertion and fewer injuries for staff members.

In Brazil, researchers used AI models capable of predicting HER2 subtype breast cancer in imaging scans of 311 women and the patients’ response to treatment. In addition, AI can also help make health resource allocations more efficient and support tasks such as preparing for public health crises, such as pandemics. At the individual level, the use of this technology in wearables, such as smartwatches, can encourage patient adherence to treatments, help prevent illnesses, and collect data more frequently.

Biometric data gathered from wearable devices could also be a game-changer. This technology can detect cancers early, monitor infectious diseases and general health issues, and give patients more agency over their health where access to health care is limited or expensive.

Education and health care in the West could also benefit from AI. In the United States, text synthesis machines could help to address the lack of teachers in K–12 education and the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people.

Predicting the Future

AI is already playing a role in helping humanity tackle natural disasters (e.g., 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 been found to estimate the number of aftershocks better than conventional (non-AI) models do.

Forecasting models can also 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 used for this purpose. These improvements could have a massive impact on people in poor countries, who currently lack access to reliable forecasts and tend to be employed in agriculture, which is highly dependent on the weather.

A Case for Optimism

Much of the fear regarding AI in the West concerns the rapid speed at which it is being implemented, but for many countries, this speed is a boon.

Take the mobile phone. In 2000, only 4 percent of people in developing countries had access to mobile phones. By 2015, 94 percent of the population had such access, including in sub-Saharan Africa.

The benefits were enormous, as billions gained access to online banking, educational opportunities, and more reliable communication. One study found that almost 1 in 10 Kenyan families living in extreme poverty were able to lift their incomes above the poverty line by using the banking app M-Pesa. In rural Peru, household consumption rose by 11 percent with access to phones, while extreme poverty fell 5.4 percent. Some 24 percent of people in developing countries now use the mobile internet for educational purposes, compared with only 12 percent in the richest countries. In lower-income countries, access to mobile phones and apps is life-changing.

AI, which only requires access to a mobile phone to use, is likely to spread even faster in the countries that need the technology the most.

This is what we should be talking about: not a technology panic but a technology revolution for greater equality in well-being.

CBS News | Tertiary Education

Harvard Will Cap Number of A Grades Awarded

May 22, 2026

“Harvard University faculty members voted to cap the number of A’s awarded to students, a grading change aimed at making student marks more meaningful.

By a vote of 458 to 201, faculty approved a measure that caps the number of A grades at 20%, plus four additional per class, the university confirmed Wednesday. There is no limit to the number of A minuses or other grades that can be awarded. A separate measure that would have allowed courses to opt out of the cap was rejected, 364 to 292.

The new policy, which only applies to undergraduate students, goes into effect in the fall of 2027 and will be reassessed after three years.”

From CBS News.

Brookings | Education Spending

US College Has Become Much More Affordable Since 2019

Apr 14, 2026

“Colleges and universities that participate in federal student aid programs have been required to publish a net price calculator (NPC) since 2011. These calculators provide institution-specific estimates of what students are likely to pay, based on family income, assets, and other information…

Since 2019, research teams I organized have collected net prices using these calculators for a consistent sample of four-year colleges and universities. Institutions are grouped into private nonprofit and public sectors. Private institutions are further separated into those with larger and smaller endowments per student, while public institutions are divided between state flagship or research-intensive (‘R1’) campuses and more regionally focused institutions.

From each category, 50 institutions were randomly selected, yielding a total sample of 200 colleges and universities. The 50 private, well-endowed institutions have been further subdivided to distinguish between those with endowments exceeding $500,000 per full-time equivalent (FTE) student from those with endowments between $100,000 and $500,000 per FTE. Among the selected institutions, 15 are in the former group and 35 are in the latter. Universities in this category with more than 3,000 tuition-paying students are subject to the significantly increased endowment tax introduced as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enacted last summer.

At each institution, NPC estimates were generated for students from four hypothetical families with different financial circumstances. Income and asset levels correspond to the 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles of the distribution for families with children approaching college age observed in the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, updated for inflation over time. These income levels correspond to approximately $45,000, $85,000, $140,000, and $250,000 in today’s dollars. In addition to reporting net prices for each scenario, the analysis also presents the full published cost of attendance (the ‘sticker price’), which continues to receive outsized attention even though few students pay that amount.

Tables 1A–E and Figures 1A–1E present the results for each category of institution. Net prices for all income groups are lower in 2025–26 than they were six years earlier, and the full cost of attendance has declined as well. That is, sticker prices have not kept pace with inflation. While there are some minor year-to-year differences across income groups, the overall patterns are clear. For students at the 25th percentile of the income distribution (incomes below about $45,000) prices have fallen almost continuously and are now roughly 15–30% lower than in 2019–20.”

From Brookings.

UNESCO | Education & Literacy

Sub-Saharan Africa Leads Global Education Enrollment Gains

Apr 3, 2026

“Since 2000, sub‑Saharan Africa has more than doubled primary enrolment and more than tripled secondary enrolment; in low‑income countries, secondary enrolment has almost quadrupled. Over the same period, the school‑age population fell by 9% in upper‑middle‑ and high‑income countries, rose by 25% in lower‑middle‑income countries and doubled in low‑income countries…

Since 2000, the completion rate has increased from 77% to 88% in primary education (92% if very late completers are considered), from 60% to 78% in lower secondary education (82% with very late completers) and from 37% to 61% in in upper secondary education (64.5% with very late completers). In other words, the upper secondary completion rate has grown by 0.8 percentage points per year since 2000. Looking at historical rates of progress, the world would achieve 95% upper secondary completion by 2105 in the average scenario, by 2081 in the fast expansion scenario (at the 75th percentile), and by 2062 in the fastest expansion scenario (average of top 25%)…

Between 2000–04 and 2020–24, repetition rates fell by two thirds in primary and by 40% in lower secondary education. As systems expanded and quality declined, repetition rose and slowed progress, but over time students improved their progression.”

From UNESCO.

Nature | Child Abuse & Bullying

Child Marriages Plunged When Girls Stayed in School in Nigeria

Mar 17, 2026

“An educational programme for young girls in northern Nigeria that involved local religious leaders massively reduced the number of child marriages, a study reported in Nature today has found…

In the first year of the programme, out-of-school girls were offered accelerated learning in reading, mathematics, life skills and business skills in ‘safe spaces’ dedicated to them. In the second year, the emphasis was on ensuring that the girls return to school. Parents were helped with the costs of school fees and uniforms, and girls continued to have access to tutoring and mentoring in the safe spaces, which were like after-school clubs. Those who did not return to school were offered vocational training to work in local shops.

What is new about this approach is that the researchers tested its effectiveness in a randomized control trial. The researchers enrolled 1,181 adolescent girls from 18 communities in the states of Borno, Kaduna and Kano who were both out of school and unmarried at the start of the programme. The communities were divided into nine pairs: one community of each pair participated in the programme while the other did not. The involvement of local leaders helped the programme to recruit almost all of the girls that met the inclusion criteria in each community, Abubakar says.

The trial took place between 2018 and 2020, and participants were surveyed at the beginning and at the end of the programme. By the final survey, 79% of the girls participating in the programme were still unmarried, versus about 14% in the group that did not participate. This corresponds to an 80% decrease in the likelihood of marriage during the study period, the researchers say.”

From Nature.