“AI is being marshalled in multiple fields on the African continent, which contains some of the poorest countries in the world: in Zambia, to help improve medical diagnostics; in Kenya, to enable farmers to identify crop disease; and in Ethiopia, to tailor education materials to pupils’ needs…

Proponents argue that AI can help poorer societies ‘leapfrog’ whole phases of development in the same way that many countries, lacking landline infrastructure, enthusiastically adopted mobile phones in the early 2000s. Once handsets spread, new innovations followed, allowing people to use their devices for everything from financial transactions to paying for access to solar power.

‘Well-run digital systems make states more capable,’ said Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in an interview with the Financial Times last year, in which he extolled the virtues of developing nations embracing the digital revolution.   

To optimists, AI presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to go one step further. Machine learning, they argue, can turbocharge the leapfrogging phenomenon by putting revolutionary tools into the hands of individuals, businesses and states.”

From Financial Times.