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.

National Institutes of Health | Drug Use

Weekly GLP-1 Can Further Reduce Heavy Drinking

Jul 10, 2026

“A team of National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists and international colleagues have reported the first evidence from a randomized controlled clinical trial indicating that a GLP-1 receptor agonist can reduce the days in which patients with obesity and alcohol use disorder engage in heavy drinking. Led by researchers at Copenhagen University Hospital, the new study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that GLP-1s could be useful in treating alcohol use disorder.

“Very few medications are currently approved for alcohol use disorder, and these are vastly underutilized. A new option that is more accessible and more effective could be a gamechanger for closing the treatment gap,” said Director of NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) George Koob, Ph.D., a study co-author.

Research has increasingly suggested that GLP-1s approved for weight loss may benefit those with substance use disorders. While one recent clinical trial found that a GLP-1 had no effect on the heavy drinking of study participants as a whole group, a subset who had obesity responded strongly.

The authors of the new study specifically enrolled 108 treatment-seeking patients with alcohol use disorder and comorbid obesity. In addition to standard cognitive behavioral therapy, participants received either a placebo or a dose of semaglutide on a weekly basis for 26 weeks. Throughout the trial, the researchers collected self-reported drinking data as well as measurements of several quantitative biomarkers.

They found that participants receiving semaglutide experienced a 41.1% reduction in heavy drinking days, a 13.7% greater reduction than that of the placebo group. Measurements of blood-alcohol biomarkers supported the self-reported-data-based findings. As expected, the researchers saw that decreases in bodyweight, blood pressure, and other clinical measures were more pronounced in the GLP-1 group. The authors took note of some adverse effects, including gastrointestinal symptoms, though they were transient and mild.”

From National Institutes of Health.

Nature | Health Systems

The AI Wins Quietly Transforming Drug Discovery and Development

Jun 26, 2026

“Start-up slide decks are packed with claims that artificial intelligence (AI) will soon deliver new therapeutics from scratch, against previously undruggable targets, at record speed and low cost. Small biotechs and big pharma firms alike are similarly talking up the revolutionary impacts of these technologies for all aspects of drug discovery. But for David Reese, Amgen’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), many of the nearest AI gains will make neither the elevator pitch nor the front-page news…

Reese has long been thinking about how to make the most of AI. Since transitioning from Amgen’s head of R&D to its first CTO in 2023, he has been focused on rolling out a few high-priority applications in areas including target discovery, lead optimization, manufacturing and clinical trial recruitment. None of these wins are glamorous, he adds, but the field will likely look back on them as essential.”

From Nature.

TechSpot | Health Systems

A Florida Hospital Uses Palantir to Catch Sepsis, Saves 866 Lives

Jun 15, 2026

“At Tampa General Hospital in Florida, a real-time data platform is changing how doctors spot one of medicine’s deadliest conditions. The system, developed with Palantir, pulls together data from across the hospital – vital signs, lab results, clinician notes – and analyzes it continuously to flag early signs of sepsis. Since it was introduced, staff say they are catching sepsis earlier and seeing fewer patients die from it.

The system is estimated to have helped save 886 lives since August 2022. Sepsis is notoriously difficult to catch early. It can begin with small shifts in vital signs that do not immediately stand out – slight increases in heart rate, minor temperature changes, subtle indicators that can easily be lost in the noise of a busy hospital floor. Once it takes hold, though, it can escalate quickly, triggering organ failure and, in many cases, death. Roughly one in five patients diagnosed with sepsis does not survive.

The approach at Tampa General is built around catching early signals before they develop into a crisis. The hospital partnered with Palantir to use its Foundry platform alongside existing clinical systems.

The result is a continuous stream of aggregated data pulled from electronic health records, lab results, clinician notes and bedside monitors. Instead of sitting in separate systems, that data is unified and presented in real time through a centralized dashboard that tracks roughly 1,000 patients at once.

From there, the software looks for patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. When those patterns suggest the early stages of sepsis, alerts are sent to a rapid response team, giving clinicians a chance to act before the condition worsens. At Tampa General, patients flagged with suspected sepsis get antibiotics within an hour.”

From TechSpot.

Marginal Revolution | Health Systems

The Pilot for AI Prescriptions Refills in Utah Looks Promising

May 29, 2026

“The first review of the pilot for AI prescriptions refills in Utah is out and it looks very reasonable. In the 72% of cases where the AI recommend a refill at least one of two physicians agreed in 97% of cases.

In the 28% of Cases Where the AI Escalated to a Physician Without Recommending Renewal

When the AI declined to recommend renewal without further information, a human telehealth appointment was arranged.
For these patients, 69% of physician reviews agreed that the escalation was appropriate, and more information was needed to authorize a renewal.
In the other 31% of cases, the physician determined the escalation was overly cautious.
For a new system like this, overcaution is appropriate and welcome. In the long term, reducing overcaution without compromising safety would improve patient access to care, but we aren’t rushing to see that happen.”

From Marginal Revolution.