Centers of Progress, Pt. 11: Baghdad (Astronomy)

Baghdad was a major learning center that saw notable breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics and other fields.

Chelsea Follett — Sep 11, 2020

Today marks the eleventh installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen? The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city that has helped to create and define the modern world. This bi-weekly column will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.

Our eleventh Center of Progress is 9th century Baghdad, during the Abbasid caliphate at the beginning of the so-called Islamic Golden Age. Baghdad was quickly growing into the world’s largest city and was a major learning center that saw breakthroughs in mathematics and, most notably, astronomy. As the intellectual capital of the Muslim world, which stretched from Spain to China, Baghdad attracted scholars from many different locations. While the predominant faith was Islam, the city became a melting pot of many other religions and cultures. For a time, Baghdad had a relatively open and tolerant society that allowed the city to flourish. The House of Wisdom was a library established in Abbasid-era Baghdad that soon grew into one of history’s greatest intellectual centers. It was a hub of translation, philosophical exchange, and innovation.

Today, Baghdad serves as Iraq’s capital, and some estimate it to be the Arab World’s third-largest city by population after Cairo and Riyadh. Tragically, the city has suffered many deaths, infrastructure damage, and a loss of irreplaceable historical artifacts due to recent conflicts and instability. It is among the most dangerous cities on Earth, and travel there is not recommended due to the risks of terrorism and armed conflict that plague the area. Today’s Baghdad is about as far as one can imagine from the city during its golden age when the urban center was a beacon of peace, tolerance, and scholarship. Literacy rates in the city may have been higher than those in many European cities at the time.

A small hamlet among several villages along the Tigris river first bore the pre-Islamic name Baghdad. The abundant water source has sustained human settlement in the area for millennia. In the 8th century, the Abbasid dynasty (the second Muslim dynasty) founded its capital in the propitious riverside location where the pre-existing settlement of Baghdad stood. While the meaning of “Baghdad,” is disputed, many scholars think that it means “Godgiven,” and is of Persian origin. During the Abbasid era, Baghdad’s official name was the “City of Peace,” or Madinat as-Salam.

The first Abbasid caliph, or ruler, Al-Mansur, summoned engineers, architects, surveyors, and artists from many countries to construct the city over four years (764–768 AD). The city’s construction began in July, as demanded by the Abbasid court astrologers. Those astrologers believed that starting construction under the Greek astrological sign of Leo, the lion, would ensure the city’s success.

While the city’s origin may have been dictated by astrology, a pseudoscience, there was not always a stark distinction between astrologers and astronomers. People who believed that the night sky could foretell human destinies were highly motivated to accurately predict the stars’ movements. Hence many astrologers studied legitimate astronomy, and many people considered astrology to be a branch of astronomy for centuries.

If you could visit Baghdad during its golden age, you would have entered a hectic commerce and scholarship center teeming with people of many different cultures speaking various languages. Many Baghdadis would have worn sandals and luxurious garments combining elements of the Arab, Irano-Turkic, and Hellenistic Mediterranean styles of dress. At the center of the city’s circular layout, defined by rounded archways and curving walls, rose the domes of the caliphal Palace of the Golden Gate and the city’s main mosque.

The 9th-century author Al-Jahiz wrote, “I have seen the great cities, including those noted for their durable construction. I have seen such cities in the districts of Syria, in Byzantine territory, and in other provinces, but I have never seen a city of greater height, more perfect circularity, more endowed with superior merits or possessing more spacious gates or more perfect defenses than [Baghdad].”

Baghdad was abuzz with commerce. Alongside the city’s four main roads, positioned like spokes on a wheel within the city’s circular design, stood vaulted arcades where merchants conducted their trade. In the crowded chaos of the city’s famous bazaars, you would have found goods from around the world, delivered by caravans of camels traveling the Great Khurasan Road to the city or arriving via the Tigris river trade route. You would have seen fine silk and pottery from China, elephants and spices from India, as well as rubies and other precious stones from Sri Lanka, and local delicacies such as judhaba. (Medieval Baghdadis were passionate about food, with the city’s leaders holding elite cooking competitions). Horrifyingly, you would also have seen people for sale—Baghdad practiced slavery, as did all major societies at that time.

In the bazaars, you would also find astrologers offering their services and many objects for sale decorated with artistic depictions of the planets and the Greek zodiac constellations. But there was more to the city’s connection to the night sky than a popular enthusiasm for astrology.

In the House of Wisdom or Grand Library of Baghdad, you would have seen astronomers hard at work, occupying a prominent position alongside other scholars. Adding to the city library’s collection of books and manuscripts became a point of pride for the city’s rulers. By the 9th century, the city housed an immense amalgamation of writings composed in Persian, Syriac, Sanskrit, Greek, and other languages, and produced Arabic translations of those works. Baghdad’s scholars’ large-scale translation effort has come to be known as the “Translation Movement,” sometimes called the Greco-Arabic translation movement due to its emphasis on translating Greek wisdom.

The Caliph Al-Ma’mun, who reigned from 813 AD to 833 AD, allegedly paid one particularly acclaimed translator, Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873 AD), the weight in gold of every book that he translated. He felt that wisdom was, quite literally, worth its weight in gold. Ishaq, nicknamed “Sheik of the translators” (sheik being a title for a prince or ruler), became the era’s most prolific decipherer of Greek medical and scientific texts. He was a Christian, and his ability to achieve a high social position despite being part of a religious minority group testifies to the cosmopolitanism and tolerance of the era. His son, Ishaq ibn Hunayn (circa 830–circa 910 AD), continued the family tradition by translating Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almagest into Arabic. The city’s leaders had long admired Euclid, and Baghdad’s circular design may be an homage to Euclid’s geometric teachings.

The Almagest was the first major work on astronomy. After that tome’s translation into Arabic, Baghdad’s astronomers set about correcting several of Ptolemy’s calculations regarding the planets’ movements. They also perfected the astrolabe, an important tool not only in astronomy but in navigation. Furthermore, they developed spherical trigonometry and algebra, two forms of math essential to calculating the stars’ movements with precision.

Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi, a Persian polymath, astrologer, and astronomer appointed to head the House of Wisdom in 820 AD, invented the sine quadrant. That instrument takes angular measurements of altitude used in astronomy and navigation. In 828 AD, Caliph Al-Ma’mun ordered the building of the first astronomical observatory in the Islamic world, within the House of Wisdom. The historian and scientist Abul Hasan Al-Masudi, sometimes called the “Herodotus of the Arabs,” who was born near the close of the 9th century AD and worked in the 10th century AD, may have even invented a precursor to the telescope.

The city’s openness to knowledge from foreign lands and scholars of diverse backgrounds allowed Baghdad to build on others’ work and produce groundbreaking original scholarship. One House of Wisdom scholar, Abu Yusuf Ya’qub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi (circa 800–873 AD), whose work spanned fields as varied as astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, metaphysics, and music, exemplified the open and tolerant worldview that allowed Baghdad to thrive. “We ought not to be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes from,” Al-Kindi wrote, “even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. For the seeker of truth, nothing takes precedence over the truth, and there is no disparagement of the truth, nor belittling either of him who speaks it or of him who conveys it.”

In that era, such broad-minded sentiments were a rarity in most places on Earth. However, they were common among the elites of Baghdad. Al-Kindi was appointed by Caliph Al-Ma’mun to serve as the tutor to the caliph’s brother and eventual successor, Caliph Al-Mu’tasim, who ruled from 833–842 AD. That caliph, in turn, appointed Al-Kindi as tutor to the former’s son.

The prevailing interpretation of Islam encouraged philosophy and scientific inquiry. Several often-quoted hadiths, or sayings attributed to the prophet Muhammad, instructed faithful Muslims to “seek knowledge.” Those included an exhortation to “seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave” and “seek knowledge, even unto China.” Those sayings were representative of the attitude held by many of Baghdad’s scholars, some of whom even felt that there was a religious imperative to seek out knowledge. Baghdad’s scholars also believed strongly in human reason and the existence of sources of wisdom independent of divine revelation.

Unfortunately, there were also more conservative religious forces that viewed anything foreign, including foreign philosophy and scientific wisdom, as a threat to Muslim society. The conservative faction also regarded the idea of elevating human reason to the status of a source of wisdom, instead of relying solely on religious teachings for knowledge, to be blasphemous. Eventually, the triumph of the anti-rationalist and xenophobic interpretation of Islam and the subsequent persecution of the liberal Muslim scholars helped bring the Islamic Golden Age to an end.

Baghdad’s ultimate downfall came in the form of conquest. It is said that the Tigris River “ran black with ink” after the Mongol invasion in 1258 AD, led by Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan. The Mongols demolished the House of Wisdom and allegedly threw its books in the river. Sadly, thousands of books that Baghdad collected and produced have been lost or destroyed.

But for a time, while Europe’s scientific scene stagnated amid that continent’s so-called Dark Ages, Baghdad’s scholars made significant strides to further human understanding of the cosmos. Advances in astronomy during the later European renaissance built largely upon translations of Arabic works. To this day, the field of astronomy owes a great debt to the scholars of Abbasid-era Baghdad. Many stars maintain the Arabic names assigned to them during the Islamic Golden Age, like Altair and Betelgeuse. And today’s astronomers still use the Arabic words for common astronomical terms such as zenith, azimuth, and nadir.

Baghdad during the 9th century is perhaps best-known as the setting of many of the One Thousand and One Nights tales, widely known as the Arabian Nights, which were initially compiled during the Islamic Golden Age. That compendium of stories includes many well-known fables, like those of Aladdin the thief and Sinbad the sailor. The tales have created an image of Baghdad in the popular imagination as a place of wonder and adventure. But in reality, the city was also the site of serious scholarly work.

For greatly advancing the field of astronomy and contributing to scholarship in several other areas such as mathematics, early Abbasid dynasty-era Baghdad merits its place as our eleventh Center of Progress. Through openness to international intellectual exchange, as well as original research, the House of Wisdom and Baghdad’s wider academic community made leaps that were key to many later developments in the study of astronomy. At a time when Europe was immersed in a stupor known as the Dark Ages, Baghdad had its eyes on the stars.

Blog Post | Economic Growth

The Human Meaning of Economic Growth

Misunderstandings of the relationship between wealth and flourishing have obscured the anti-human implications of slowing growth rates.

Saul Zimet — May 17, 2024

Summary: Economic growth has been a driving force behind the dramatic improvements in human wellbeing over the past few centuries. This growth has resulted from the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. Criticisms of growth stem in large part from misunderstandings of the relationship between economics and human values.

Why is the world as prosperous a place as it is? And why isn’t it much more prosperous? These questions are broad enough to admit countless answers, but as good an answer as any is the economic growth rate.

You might have heard that economic growth is overrated, that it’s a fine idea, but unsustainable, or even that it’s entirely counterproductive because it puts profits above people and the economy above the planet. These narratives have been widespread in recent years. They’re also based on a fundamental misconception of the nature of wealth and what a growing economy means for humanity.

Properly conceived, wealth is the actualization of human values in the real world. Economic growth is the upward trajectory of human achievement. The forms of prosperity that most of humanity strives for, such as health, knowledge, pleasure, safety, professional and personal freedom, and so many others, were vastly scarcer throughout most of human history—and would be orders of magnitude more abundant today if economic policies had been slightly different. That is the power of economic growth, and it is within our power to influence the world of future generations for better or worse.

The History of Economic Growth

Virtually everywhere and always throughout human history, economic growth was nonexistent. While pockets of momentary economic progress took place in certain instances, the overall trend was one of perpetual stagnation. But just a few hundred years ago, with the advent of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism, that all began to change.

When the conceptual tools of science became widely applied to create the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution, they brought an unprecedented optimism about the capacity for investment in new discoveries and inventions to reliably uncover useful knowledge of the natural world. This change inspired the broad transformation of mere wealth (resources hidden away in vaults and treasure chests) into capital (resources invested in new inventions and discoveries).

By the time Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx wrote their Communist Manifesto in 1848, the optimism of investment had already transformed Western Europe. As Engels and Marx saw it, “The bourgeoisie [capitalist class], during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”

Marx and Engels misunderstand the complex reasons for increased productivity (attributing it to untapped “social labour”) but the quotation is significant because, despite their sympathy for state centralization of the economy, they could not ignore the success of capitalism.

While no year before 1700 saw a gross world product of more than $643 billion (in international inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars), by 1820 global GDP reached 1 trillion. By 1940 the number had passed 7 trillion, and by 2015 it had passed 108 trillion.

Contrary to the popular misconception that capitalism has made the rich richer and the poor poorer, this new wealth contributed to growing the economies of every world region while outpacing population growth. While the world’s extreme poor have become wealthier so too have all other economic classes.

What’s So Great about Growth?

A growing economy isn’t about stacks of paper money getting taller, or digits being added to the spreadsheets of bank ledgers. These things may be indicators of growth, but the growth itself is composed of goods and services becoming more abundant. Farms and factories producing more and better consumption goods; engineers creating better machines and materials; clean water reaching more communities; sick people receiving better healthcare; scientists running more experiments, poets writing more poems, education becoming more broadly accessible; and for whatever other forms of value people choose to exchange their savings and labor.

Gross domestic product or GDP (called gross world product or world GDP when applied at the global level) is an imperfect but useful and widely employed measure of economic growth, and its reflection in the real world takes such forms as rising life expectancy, nutrition, literacy, safety from natural disaster, and virtually every other measure of human flourishing. This is because, at the most fundamental level, “economic growth” means the transformation and rearrangement of the physical environment into more useful forms that people value more.

Before the year 1820, human life expectancy had always been approximately 30-35 years. But with the great decline in poverty and rise of capital investment in technology and medicine, global life expectancy has roughly doubled in every geographic region in the last century. Similar trends have occurred in global nourishment, infant survival, literacy, access to clean water, and countless other crucial indicators of wellbeing. While these trends are bound to take the occasional momentary downturn because of life’s uncertainties and hardships, the unidirectional accumulation of technological and scientific knowledge since the Age of Enlightenment gives the forward march of progress an asymmetric advantage. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns resulted in a brief and tragic decline in life expectancy, but the number has since risen to an all-time high of 73.36 years as of 2023.

What is the direct causal connection between economic growth and these improvements to human wellbeing? Consider the example of deaths by natural disaster, which have fallen in the last century from about 26.5 per 100,000 people to 0.51 per 100,000 people. More wealth means buildings can be constructed from stronger materials and better climate controls. And when those protections aren’t enough, a wealthier community can afford better infrastructure such as roads and vehicles to efficiently get sick or injured people to the hospital. When those injured end up in the hospital, a wealthier society’s medical facilities will be equipped with more advanced equipment, cleaner sanitation, and better-trained doctors that will provide higher quality medical attention. These are just a few examples of how wealth allows humans to transform their world into a more hospitable place to live and face the inevitable challenges of life.

The benefits of economic growth go far beyond the maximization of health and safety for their own sake. If what you value in life is the contemplation of great art, the exaltation of your favorite deity, or time spent with your loved ones, wealth is what awards you the freedom to sustainably pursue those values rather tilling the fields for 16 hours per day and dying in your 30s. Wealth is what provides you access to an ever-improving share of the world’s culture by increasing the abundance and accessibility of printed, recorded, and digital materials. Wealth is what provides you with the leisure time and transportation technology to travel the world and experience distant wonders, remote holy sites, and people whose personal or professional significance to you would otherwise dwell beyond your reach.

As the Harvard University cognitive scientist Steven Pinker demonstrates in his popular book Enlightenment Now, “Though it’s easy to sneer at national income as a shallow and materialistic measure, it correlates with every indicator of human flourishing, as we will repeatedly see in the chapters to come.”

The Long-Term Future of Growth

Human psychology is ill-equipped to comprehend large numbers, especially as they relate to the profound numerical implications of exponentiation. If it sounds insignificant when politicians and journalists refer to a 1 percent or 2 percent increase or decrease in the annual growth rate, then like most people, you’re being deceived by a quirk of human intuition. While small changes to the economic growth rate may not have noticeable effects in the short term, their long- term implications are absolutely astonishing.

Economist Tyler Cowen has pointed out in a Foreign Affairs article, “In the medium to long term, even small changes in growth rates have significant consequences for living standards. An economy that grows at one percent doubles its average income approximately every 70 years, whereas an economy that grows at three percent doubles its average income about every 23 years—which, over time, makes a big difference in people’s lives.” In his book Stubborn Attachments, Cowen offers a thought experiment to illustrate the real-world implications of such “small changes” to the growth rate: “Redo U.S. history, but assume the country’s economy had grown one percentage point less each year between 1870 and 1990. In that scenario, the United States of 1990 would be no richer than the Mexico of 1990.”

Cowen gave the negative scenario in which the growth rate was 1 percent slower. US Citizens would have drastically shorter lifespans, less education, less healthcare, less safety from violence, more susceptibility to disease and natural disaster, fewer career choices, and so on. Now imagine the opposite scenario, in which US economic policy had just 1 additional percentage point of growth each year. The average American today would in all probability be living much longer, having much nicer housing, choosing from far more career opportunities, and enjoying more advanced technology.

Just imagine your income doubling, and what you could do for yourself, your family, or the charity of your choice with all that extra wealth. Something along those lines could have happened to most Americans. But instead, growth has been significantly slowed in the United States because taxes and regulations have constantly disincentivized and disallowed new innovations.

At the margins, many dying of preventable diseases could have been cured, many who spiraled into homelessness could have accessed the employment opportunities or mental health treatment they needed, and so on. While economic fortune seems like a luxury to those who already enjoy material comfort, there are always many at the margin for whom the health of the economy is the difference between life and death.

These are among the reasons that Harvard University economist Gregory Mankiw concludes in his commonly used college textbook Macroeconomics that, “Long-run economic growth is the single most important determinant of the economic well-being of a nation’s citizens. Everything else that macroeconomists study — unemployment, inflation, trade deficits, and so on — pales in comparison.”

When we think of the future our children or grandchildren will live in, depending on our choices between even slightly more or less restrictive economic policies today, we could be plausibly looking at a future of widespread and affordable space travel, life-changing education and remote work opportunities in the metaverse, new sustainable energy innovations, a biotechnological revolution in the human capacity for medical and psychological flourishing, genome projects and conservation investments to revive extinct and protect endangered species, and countless other improvements to the human condition. Or we could be looking at a drawn-out stagnation in poverty alleviation, technological advancement, and environmental progress. The difference may well hinge on what looks today like a tiny change in the rate of compounding growth.

At the broadest level, more wealth in the hands of the human species represents a greater capacity of humans to chart their course through life and into the future in accordance with their values. Like all profound and far-reaching forms of change, economic growth has a wide range of consequences, some intended and others unintended, many desirable and many others undesirable. But it is not a random process. It is directed by the choices of individuals, and allocated by their drive to devote more resources and more investment into those things they view as worthwhile. Ever since the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution, the investment in human values has been on balance a positive sum game, in which one group’s gains do not have to come in the form of another group’s losses. This is demonstrated by the upward trends in human flourishing since the global rise in exponential economic growth. Indeed, it is intrinsic to the fundamental difference between a growing and a shrinking or stagnant economy: In a growing economy, everyone can win.

This article was published at Libertarianism.org on 11/17/2023.

Blog Post | Science & Education

AI in the Classroom Can Make Higher Education Much More Accessible

For some school subjects, artificial intelligence can transform the landscape of tutoring accessibility.

Ethan Han — Apr 26, 2024

Summary: ChatGPT4 has demonstrated superiority in various student exams, revealing its potential to support academic learning and improve educational outcomes, particularly in test preparation. With its accessibility and affordability compared to traditional tutoring services, AI tutoring can help address the increasing demand for academic support, especially as universities begin to reinstate standardized testing requirements.

In 2023, OpenAI shook the foundation of the education system by releasing ChatGPT4. The previous model of ChatGPT had already disrupted classrooms K–12 and beyond by offering a free academic tool capable of writing essays and answering exam questions. Teachers struggled with the idea that widely accessible artificial intelligence (AI) technology could meet the demands of most traditional classroom work and academic skills. GPT3.5 was far from perfect, though, and lacked creativity, nuance, and reliability. However, reports showed that GPT4 could score better than 90 percent of participants on the bar exam, LSAT, SAT reading and writing and math, and several Advanced Placement (AP) exams. This showed a significant improvement from GPT3.5, which struggled to score as well as 50 percent of participants.

This marked a major shift in the role of AI, from it being an easy way out of busy work to a tool that could improve your chances of getting into college. The US Department of Education published a report noting several areas where AI could support teacher instruction and student learning. Among the top examples was intelligent tutoring systems. Early models of these systems showed that an AI tutor could not only recognize when a student was right or wrong in a mathematical problem but also identify the steps a student took and guide them through an explanation of the process.

The role of tutoring in education has grown in significance as more and more high school students have gone to college. Private tutoring is now a booming industry. Often you can find tutors charging anywhere up to $80 for test preparation with no shortage of eager parents willing to pay for their services. Tutoring has been a go-to solution for students to improve their grades outside the classroom. But more importantly, it has been a solution to improve their chances of getting into college, with many private tutoring services focusing on AP and SAT exams. This connection between college admission success and private tutoring costs has been a problem for parents who cannot afford the costs.

ChatGPT4 is available for $20 a month. Although the program itself can be used to answer questions and provide academic support, dedicated education websites have begun incorporating AI tutors to help with test prep. Khan Academy provides free courses on AP content and SAT exams and offers an AI-powered tutor for these subjects at $4 a month. Duolingo, a popular language learning app that offers university-recognized language exams, offers Duolingo Max at $14 a month. These tutoring services are accessible at your fingertips at any time. There is no need to schedule video conferencing calls, do background checks on tutors, or pay extra costs. Quality individualized academic support is available at a moment’s notice.

The availability of AI tutoring services is occurring at a crucial moment in education. As students become accustomed to post-pandemic life, student achievement across the nation still has not returned to where it once was. Despite that, many universities have begun reversing test-optional policies that had allowed students to avoid taking standardized tests such as the SAT. The demand for tutoring has skyrocketed as many new high school seniors struggle to meet the old standards of college admissions. Many school tutoring programs have not been able to provide the support students need, and private tutoring costs are only increasing.

AI has the potential to provide cheap and effective tutoring for these exams while being easily accessible. A Harvard computer science course has been able to incorporate ChatGPT to great success, using it to provide continuous and customized technical support and allowing professors to focus more on pedagogy. As technology improves, students will have more support for academic pursuits, opening an easier path to higher education but also allowing students to more easily explore academic interests beyond rigid classroom instruction.

Blog Post | Science & Technology

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.

Blog Post | Education & Literacy

How to Combat Gloom and Pessimism

Given the inhospitable world we have evolved in, humans have learned to prioritize the bad news.

Marian L. Tupy — Mar 8, 2024

Summary: Optimism flourishes more in rapidly growing countries, fueled by the promise of improvements in living standards, a phenomenon less evident in relatively developed nations like the US. Human nature, predisposed to focus on negative news, collides with media outlets’ profit-driven emphasis on sensationalism, perpetuating a cycle of pessimism. Understanding our negativity bias and learning probabilistic reasoning skills can help navigate the deluge of alarming headlines, while seeking out sources of positive news can provide a more balanced perspective.

Surveys show that optimism is highest in rapidly growing countries that are catching up with the developed world. High growth rates allow the citizens of those nations to experience massive year-on-year increases in standards of living – something that, in the absence of an AI-led revolution in productivity, is unlikely to occur in already developed countries. Slow and steady progress, such as the one currently underway in the United States, does not seem sufficient to inspire widespread optimism about the future.

The problem of incrementalism is compounded by the interaction between human nature and the media. Given the inhospitable world we have evolved in, humans have learned to prioritize the bad news. Consequently, the media has embraced the “if it bleeds, it leads” business model. Worse still, growing competition between television, newspapers, and websites has significantly increased negative content over time. The inclusion of an additional negative word in a headline, for example, leads to 2.3 percent more clicks, according to a recent study.

Unfortunately, most people are unaware of our innate negativity bias. It may be helpful to include the understanding of basic human psychology in high-school curricula. While we may not be able to purge the negativity bias from our brains, understanding how and why we react to a ceaseless barrage of terrifying headlines in certain ways may help us gain a proper perspective on the world around us.

Another way to get around the apocalyptic headlines and focus on the largely positive trendlines is to develop a more sophisticated understanding of statistical probabilities. While evidence suggests that humans have an innate capacity for probabilistic reasoning, the formal application of Bayesian inference – which is to say, adjustment of our beliefs or guesses about something as we learn more information – is a learned skill. Infants and untrained adults show abilities that align with Bayesian principles on a basic level, indicating an intuitive understanding of probability and uncertainty. However, the precise and formal application of Bayesian reasoning requires education, especially in complex scenarios.

Finally, humans can choose what kind of information to consume. Knowing that traditional media does not offer a realistic picture of the world, people can sign up for services – such as the Human Progress weekly newsletter – that collate the positive happenings ignored by mainstream media outlets.