The path for AI in poor nations does not need to be paved with billions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Editorial in Nature: “Coinciding with US President Donald Trump’s tour of Gulf states last week, Saudi Arabia announced that it is embarking on a large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) initiative. The proposed venture will have state backing and considerable involvement from US technology firms. It is the latest move in a global expansion of AI ambitions beyond the existing heartlands of the United States, China and Europe. However, as Nature India, Nature Africa and Nature Middle East report in a series of articles on AI in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) published on 21 May (see go.nature.com/45jy3qq), the path to home-grown AI doesn’t need to be paved with billions, or even hundreds of millions, of dollars, or depend exclusively on partners in Western nations or China…, as a News Feature that appears in the series makes plain (see go.nature.com/3yrd3u2), many initiatives in LMICs aren’t focusing on scaling up, but on ‘scaling right’. They are “building models that work for local users, in their languages, and within their social and economic realities”.

More such local initiatives are needed. Some of the most popular AI applications, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini, are trained mainly on data in European languages. That would mean that the model is less effective for users who speak Hindi, Arabic, Swahili, Xhosa and countless other languages. Countries are boosting home-grown apps by funding start-up companies, establishing AI education programmes, building AI research and regulatory capacity and through public engagement.

Those LMICs that have started investing in AI began by establishing an AI strategy, including policies for AI research. However, as things stand, most of the 55 member states of the African Union and of the 22 members of the League of Arab States have not produced an AI strategy. That must change…(More)”.

The AI Policy Playbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Playbook by AI Policymaker Network & Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH: “It moves away from talking about AI ethics in abstract terms but tells of building policies that work right-away in emerging economies and respond to immediate development priorities. The Playbook emphasises that a one-size-fits-all solution doesn’t work. Rather, it illustrates shared challenges—like limited research capacity, fragmented data ecosystems, and compounding AI risks—while spotlighting national innovations and success stories. From drafting AI strategies to engaging communities and safeguarding rights, it lays out a roadmap grounded in local realities….What can you expect to find in the AI Policy Playbook:

  1. Policymaker Interviews
    Real-world insights from policymakers to understand their challenges and best practices.
  2. Policy Process Analysis
    Key elements from existing policies to extract effective strategies for AI governance, as well as policy mapping.
  3. Case Studies
    Examples of successes and lessons learnt from various countries to provide practical guidance.
  4. Recommendations
    Concrete solutions and recommendations from actors in the field to improve the policy development process, including quick tips for implementation and handling challenges.

What distinguishes this initiative is its commitment to peer learning and co-creation. The Africa-Asia AI Policymaker Network comprises over 30 high-level government partners who anchor the Playbook in real-world policy contexts. This ensures that the frameworks are not only theoretically sound but politically and socially implementable…(More)”

Europe’s dream to wean off US tech gets reality check

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Pieter Haeck and Mathieu Pollet: “..As the U.S. continues to up the ante in questioning transatlantic ties, calls are growing in Europe to reduce the continent’s reliance on U.S. technology in critical areas such as cloud services, artificial intelligence and microchips, and to opt for European alternatives instead.

But the European Commission is preparing on Thursday to acknowledge publicly what many have said in private: Europe is nowhere near being able to wean itself off U.S. Big Tech.

In a new International Digital Strategy the EU will instead promote collaboration with the U.S., according to a draft seen by POLITICO, as well as with other tech players including China, Japan, India and South Korea. “Decoupling is unrealistic and cooperation will remain significant across the technological value chain,” the draft reads. 

It’s a reality check after a year that has seen calls for a technologically sovereign Europe gain significant traction. In December the Commission appointed Finland’s Henna Virkkunen as the first-ever commissioner in charge of tech sovereignty. After few months in office, European Parliament lawmakers embarked on an effort to draft a blueprint for tech sovereignty. 

Even more consequential has been the rapid rise of the so-called Eurostack movement, which advocates building out a European tech infrastructure and has brought together effective voices including competition economist Cristina Caffarra and Kai Zenner, an assistant to key European lawmaker Axel Voss.

There’s wide agreement on the problem: U.S. cloud giants capture over two-thirds of the European market, the U.S. outpaces the EU in nurturing companies for artificial intelligence, and Europe’s stake in the global microchips market has crumbled to around 10 percent. Thursday’s strategy will acknowledge the U.S.’s “superior ability to innovate” and “Europe’s failure to capitalise on the digital revolution.”

What’s missing are viable solutions to the complex problem of unwinding deep-rooted dependencies….(More)”

Reliable data facilitates better policy implementation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ganesh Rao and Parul Agarwal: “Across India, state government departments are at the forefront of improving human capabilities through education, health, and nutrition programmes. Their ability to do so effectively depends on administrative (or admin) data1 collected and maintained by their staff. This data is collected as part of regular operations and informs both day-to-day decision-making and long-term policy. While policymaking can draw on (reasonably reliable) sample surveys alone, effective implementation of schemes and services requires accurate individual-level admin data. However, unreliable admin data can be a severe constraint, forcing bureaucrats to rely on intuition, experience, and informed guesses. Improving the reliability of admin data can greatly enhance state capacity, thereby improving governance and citizen outcomes.  

There has been some progress on this front in recent years. For instance, the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) trinity has significantly improved direct benefit transfer (DBT) mechanisms by ensuring that certain recipient data is reliable. However, challenges remain in accurately capturing the well-being of targeted citizens. Despite significant investments in the digitisation of data collection and management systems, persistent reliability issues undermine the government’s efforts to build a data-driven decision-making culture…

There is growing evidence of serious quality issues in admin data. At CEGIS, we have conducted extensive analyses of admin data across multiple states, uncovering systemic issues in key indicators across sectors and platforms. These quality issues compound over time, undermining both micro-level service delivery and macro-level policy planning. This results in distorted budget allocations, gaps in service provision, and weakened frontline accountability…(More)”.

Project Push creates an archive of news alerts from around the world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Neel Dhanesha: “A little over a year ago, Matt Taylor began to feel like he was getting a few too many push notifications from the BBC News app.

It’s a feeling many of us can probably relate to. Many people, myself included, have turned off news notifications entirely in the past few months. Taylor, however, went in the opposite direction.

Instead of turning off notifications, he decided to see how the BBC — the most popular news app in the U.K., where Taylor lives —  compared to other news organizations around the world. So he dug out an old Google Pixel phone, downloaded 61 news apps onto it, and signed up for push notifications on all of them.

As notifications roll in, a custom-built script (made with the help of ChatGPT) uploads their text to a server and a Bluesky page, providing a near real-time view of push notifications from services around the world. Taylor calls it Project Push.

People who work in news “take the front page very seriously,” said Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times who built Project Push in his spare time. “There are lots of editors who care a lot about that, but actually one of the most important people in the newsroom is the person who decides that they’re going to press a button that sends an immediate notification to millions of people’s phones.”

The Project Push feed is a fascinating portrait of the news today. There are the expected alerts — breaking news, updates to ongoing stories like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the latest shenanigans in Washington — but also:

— Updates on infrastructure plans that, without the context, become absolutely baffling (a train will instead be a bus?).

— Naked attempts to increase engagement.

— Culture updates that some may argue aren’t deserving of a push alert from the Associated Press.

— Whatever this is.

Taylor tells me he’s noticed some geographic differences in how news outlets approach push notifications. Publishers based in Asia and the Middle East, for example, send far more notifications than European or American ones; CNN Indonesia alone pushed about 17,000 of the 160,000 or so notifications Project Push has logged over the past year…(More)”.

Digital Democracy in a Divided Global Landscape

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

10 essays by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “A first set of essays analyzes how local actors are navigating the new tech landscape. Lillian Nalwoga explores the challenges and upsides of Starlink satellite internet deployment in Africa, highlighting legal hurdles, security risks, and concerns about the platform’s leadership. As African nations look to Starlink as a valuable tool in closing the digital divide, Nalwoga emphasizes the need to invest in strong regulatory frameworks to safeguard digital spaces. Jonathan Corpus Ong and Dean Jackson analyze the landscape of counter-disinformation funding in local contexts. They argue that there is a “mismatch” between the priorities of funders and the strategies that activists would like to pursue, resulting in “ineffective and extractive workflows.” Ong and Jackson isolate several avenues for structural change, including developing “big tent” coalitions of activists and strategies for localizing aid projects. Janjira Sombatpoonsiri examines the role of local actors in foreign influence operations in Southeast Asia. She highlights three motivating factors that drive local participation in these operations: financial benefits, the potential to gain an edge in domestic power struggles, and the appeal of anti-Western narratives.

A second set of essays explores evolving applications of digital repression…

A third set focuses on national strategies and digital sovereignty debates…

A fourth set explores pressing tech policy and regulatory questions…(More)”.

Urban Development Needs Systems Thinking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Yaera Chung: “More than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) continue to grapple with economic stagnation, aging infrastructure, and environmental degradation while also facing new pressures from climate change and regional conflicts. In this context, traditional city planning, which tackles problems in isolation, is struggling to keep up. Urban strategies often rely on siloed, one-off interventions that fail to reflect the complexity of social challenges or adapt to shifting conditions. As a result, efforts are frequently fragmented, overlook root causes, and miss opportunities for long-term, cross-sector collaboration.

Instead of addressing one issue at a time, cities need to develop a set of coordinated, interlinked solutions that tackle multiple urban challenges simultaneously and align efforts across sectors. As part of a broader strategy to address environmental, economic, and social goals at once, for example, cities might advance a range of initiatives, such as transforming biowaste into resources, redesigning streets to reduce air pollution, and creating local green jobs. These kinds of “portfolio” approaches are leading to lasting and systems-level change.

Since 2021, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has been collaborating with 15 cities across EECA to solve problems in ways that embrace complexity and interconnectedness. Selected through open calls under two UNDP initiatives, Mayors for Economic Growth and the City Experiment Fund, these cities demonstrated a strong interest in tackling systemic issues. Their proposals highlighted the problems they face, their capacity for innovation, and local initiatives and partnerships.

Their ongoing journeys have surfaced four lessons that can help other cities move beyond conventional planning pitfalls, and adopt a more responsive, inclusive, and sustainable approach to urban development…(More)”.

The New Control Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jon Askonas: “Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even breaking society itself. By subjecting their helpless users to ever more potent algorithms to boost engagement, powerful platforms distort reality and disrupt our politics. YouTube radicalizes young men into misogynists. TikTok turns moderate progressives into Hamas supporters. Facebook boosts election denialism; or it censors stories doubting the safety of mRNA vaccines. On the world stage, the fate of nations hinges on whether Twitter promotes color revolutions, WeChat censors Hong Kong protesters, and Facebook ads boost the Brexit campaign. The platforms are producing a fractured society: diversity of opinion is running amok, consensus is dead.

The second story is very different. In the 2023 essay “The age of average,” Alex Murrell recounts a project undertaken in the 1990s by Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. The artists commissioned a public affairs firm to poll over a thousand Americans on their ideal painting: the colors they liked, the subjects they gravitated toward, and so forth. Using the aggregate data, the artists created a painting, and they repeated this procedure in a number of other countries, exhibiting the final collection as an art exhibition called The People’s Choice. What they found, by and large, was not individual and national difference but the opposite: shocking uniformity — landscapes with a few animals and human figures with trees and a blue-hued color palette.

And it isn’t just paintings that are converging, Murrell argues. Car designs look more like each other than ever. Color is disappearing as most cars become white, gray, or black. From Sydney to Riyadh to Cleveland, an upscale coffee shop is more likely than ever to bear the same design features: reclaimed wood, hanging Edison bulbs, marble countertops. So is an Airbnb. Even celebrities increasingly look the same, with the rising ubiquity of “Instagram face” driven by cosmetic injectables and Photoshop touch-ups.

Murrell focuses on design, but the same trend holds elsewhere: Kirk Goldsberry, a basketball statistician, has shown that the top two hundred shot locations in the NBA today, which twenty years ago formed a wide array of the court, now form a narrow ring at the three-point line, with a dense cluster near the hoop. The less said about the sameness of pop melodies or Hollywood movies, the better.

As we approach the moment when all information everywhere from all time is available to everyone at once, what we find is not new artistic energy, not explosive diversity, but stifling sameness. Everything is converging — and it’s happening even as the power of the old monopolies and centralized tastemakers is broken up.

Are the powerful platforms now in charge? Or are the forces at work today something even bigger?..(More)”.

Indiana Faces a Data Center Backlash

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Matthew Zeitlin: “Indiana has power. Indiana has transmission. Indiana has a business-friendly Republican government. Indiana is close to Chicago but — crucially — not in Illinois. All of this has led to a huge surge of data center development in the “Crossroads of America.” It has also led to an upswell of local opposition.

There are almost 30 active data center proposals in Indiana, plus five that have already been rejected in the past year, according to data collected by the environmentalist group Citizens Action Coalition. Google, Amazon, and Meta have all announced projects in the state since the beginning of 2024.

Nipsco, one of the state’s utilities, has projected 2,600 megawatts worth of new load by the middle of the next decade as its base scenario, mostly attributable to “large economic development projects.” In a more aggressive scenario, it sees 3,200 megawatts of new load — that’s three large nuclear reactors’ worth — by 2028 and 8,600 megawatts by 2035. While short of, say, the almost 36,500 megawatts worth of load growth planned in Georgia for the next decade, it’s still a vast range of outcomes that requires some kind of advanced planning.

That new electricity consumption will likely be powered by fossil fuels. Projected load growth in the state has extended a lifeline to Indiana’s coal-fired power plants, with retirement dates for some of the fleet being pushed out to late in the 2030s. It’s also created a market for new natural gas-fired plants that utilities say are necessary to power the expected new load.

State and local political leaders have greeted these new data center projects with enthusiasm, Ben Inskeep, the program director at CAC, told me. “Economic development is king here,” he said. “That is what all the politicians and regulators say their number one concern is: attracting economic development.”..(More)”.

Policy Implications of DeepSeek AI’s Talent Base

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brief by Amy Zegart and Emerson Johnston: “Chinese startup DeepSeek’s highly capable R1 and V3 models challenged prevailing beliefs about the United States’ advantage in AI innovation, but public debate focused more on the company’s training data and computing power than human talent. We analyzed data on the 223 authors listed on DeepSeek’s five foundational technical research papers, including information on their research output, citations, and institutional affiliations, to identify notable talent patterns. Nearly all of DeepSeek’s researchers were educated or trained in China, and more than half never left China for schooling or work. Of the quarter or so that did gain some experience in the United States, most returned to China to work on AI development there. These findings challenge the core assumption that the United States holds a natural AI talent lead. Policymakers need to reinvest in competing to attract and retain the world’s best AI talent while bolstering STEM education to maintain competitiveness…(More)”.