{"id":81210,"date":"2018-08-01T14:45:31","date_gmt":"2018-08-01T21:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/futurists-in-ethiopia-are-betting-on-artificial-intelligence-to-drive-development"},"modified":"2018-08-04T10:01:10","modified_gmt":"2018-08-04T17:01:10","slug":"futurists-in-ethiopia-are-betting-on-artificial-intelligence-to-drive-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/futurists-in-ethiopia-are-betting-on-artificial-intelligence-to-drive-development","title":{"rendered":"Futurists in Ethiopia are betting on artificial intelligence to drive development"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/futurists-in-ethiopia-are-betting-on-artificial-intelligence-to-drive-development.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe should not start from steam and railways, or the old technologies\u2014that is already done,\u201d Assefa argues.<\/p>\n<p>That makes sense to academics like Singh \u2014 though he also cautions that political forces are often slow to see the bigger picture. There is definitely an opportunity for developing countries, he says. \u201cBut any time we have a technological revolution, the political institutions have to catch up.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A 2017 <a href=\"https:\/\/webfoundation.org\/docs\/2017\/07\/AI_Report_WF.pdf\">report<\/a> (pdf) by the World Wide Web Foundation suggested that Ethiopian \u201cintelligence services are using machine intelligence techniques to break encryption and find patterns in social media posts that can be used to identify dissidents.\u201d And while mobile phone and internet penetration in Ethiopia is comparatively <a href=\"https:\/\/www.economist.com\/news\/middle-east-and-africa\/21584037-government-expands-mobile-phone-network-tightens-its-grip-out-reach\">poor\u2014<\/a>a situation made worst amid widespread anti-government protests, which prompted an internet crackdown in February \u2014 the report added that government surveillance and oppression could increase as the use of smartphones expands.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/qz.com\/africa\/1301231\/ethiopias-futurists-want-artificial-intelligence-to-drive-the-countrys-development\/\">https:\/\/qz.com\/africa\/1301231\/ethiopias-futurists-want-artif...velopment\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWe should not start from steam and railways, or the old technologies\u2014that is already done,\u201d Assefa argues. That makes sense to academics like Singh \u2014 though he also cautions that political forces are often slow to see the bigger picture. There is definitely an opportunity for developing countries, he says. \u201cBut any time we have [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1625,1490,418,1512,6,1511],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-encryption","category-government","category-internet","category-mobile-phones","category-robotics-ai","category-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81342,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81210\/revisions\/81342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}