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Category: Artificial Intelligence

ChatGPT Productivity and Hallucinations Mix

11 May 202318 May 2023
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Economics, Human Development
Undoubtedly, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Few will dare deny such a non-violent takeover. And, as expected, the now familiar digital innovation hype factory is holding yet another massive and seemingly endless ball, including reluctant doomsayers. OpenAI’s March Read more

Programming – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (maybe) – II

10 April 202318 May 2023
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, FOSS, Innovation
Today Expert systems, an integral part of AI from the onset, are one of the best examples of rules-based programming. The core idea is to have a computer system that can provide the same depth of knowledge as top-notch human Read more

Programming – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (maybe) – I

1 April 202321 May 2023
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, FOSS, Innovation
Yesterday I accidentally learned how to master computer programming. I was finishing high school and faced the daunting decision of choosing a study field. As my father was an engineer, I leaned toward the same area. But my passion for Read more

The Real Structures Sustaining the Cyberspace Imaginary – II

10 March 202318 May 2023
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change, Economics, Governance, ICTD
History Matters Following the historical evolution of the Internet and Cyberspace sheds light on the origins of the “superhighway” and “virtual” metaphors, depicted in the first part of this post. Useful summaries from a pure infrastructural perspective are available from Read more

The Real Structures Sustaining the Cyberspace Imaginary – I

1 March 202318 May 2023
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change, Economics, Governance, ICTD
Recreating the Imaginary If I were to ask another human being (not ChatGPT) for directions on how to get to Cyberspace, most would probably think I am joking. Others might consider me an imbecile or conclude I must be flying Read more

AI’s Seemingly Elusive Infrastructure – II

20 February 202318 May 2023
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change, Economics, Human Development, ICTD
Undoubtedly, the infrastructural requirements used to produce the 2020 175 billion GPT-3 model are hefty by most standards. But, of course, that just means that competitors now striving to generate their own creatures on the same genre must have access Read more

AI’s Seemingly Elusive Infrastructure – I

10 February 202318 May 2023
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change, Economics, ICTD
ChatGTP’s sudden and arguably premature success has yet again exposed the usually overlooked link between so-called “virtual” digital technologies and very tangible infrastructure. Indeed, early adopters of the latest incarnation of GTP-3-based bots directly experienced repeated network and login failures. Read more

ChatGPT’s New Version

31 January 20234 February 2023
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, e-governance, Economics, Innovation
Yesterday, OpenAI released a new iteration of ChatGPT, version 3.5.  To quickly check, I decided to ask some of the same questions I did back in December. The table below compares the results. ChatGPT November 2022 v3.0 January 30 2023, Read more

Chatting with ChatGPT

15 December 20222 February 2023
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Economics, Governance, Human Development
OpenAI’s new shiny chatbot, with the not-so-brilliant name of ChatGPT, has taken the world by storm, surprising most, company staff included. Evidence of the latter stems from the fact that whenever one tries to access the platform,  a message announcing Read more

How Green is AI?

1 December 202215 January 2023
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change, Governance, Human Development, ICTD
Playing Games My father taught me how to play chess when I was nine years old or thereabouts. He played his fair share of games while he was studying engineering. He told me that a few of his classmates quit Read more

RegTech is Here!

20 September 20221 October 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Economics, Governance
Modern FinTech saw the light of day with the launching of ATM machines in the late 60s. A few years later, NASDAQ was born, credit cards exploded and banks started to deploy mainframes and minicomputer computers to support their operations. Read more

Hacking Public Policy Making with AI

15 February 20221 March 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Crowdsourcing, e-governance, Human Development
Modern Evidence-based Policy Making (EBPC) has been around for 25 years, imported into the mainstream from the health sector and its success with randomized controlled trials. The latter has now spread to many other sectors and research areas. A few Read more

AI National Policies – III

1 November 202115 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Governance, Human Development, ICTD
Policy Evolution Comparatively speaking, AI national policies and strategies have evolved much slower than other digital strategies such as ICT, Digital Government, and Open Data. That might seem paradoxical given the systemic benefits and risks of the revived and now Read more

AI National Policies – II

15 October 202115 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Governance, Human Development, ICTD
As mentioned in the previous post, policymakers should skip over the dominant technology-centered AI perspective and instead position AI as a multi-dimensional structure cutting across all sectors. Indeed, national AI policy effectiveness depends to a large extent on the AI Read more

AI National Policies – I

1 October 202115 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Governance, Human Development, ICTD
National policy development on new digital technologies has become a staple since the emergence of the Internet in the early 1990s. It has certainly not been limited to most advanced countries. Nations in the Global South have also climbed the Read more

AI Topography

2 August 202114 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Governance, Human Development, ICTD
For the last 30 years, the seemingly endless number of so-called technology revolutions invading our expansive yet decaying landscape has been accompanied by a proliferation of wide-ranging publications, usually playing catch-up while trying to predict the future on the spot. Read more

Waiting for yet another Industrial Revolution

5 July 202126 July 2021
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, e-governance, Economics, Human Development, ICTD, Innovation
The PC revolution. The Internet revolution. The mobile revolution. The social media revolution. The blockchain revolution. And the AI re-revolution. We seem to be living in times of Permanent Revolution. Also reminds me of the Age of Revolution that thrived Read more

AI and Development Policies

28 February 202114 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Governance, Human Development, ICTD
Strongly supported by behemoth tech companies, the “ethical and responsible” AI discourse has almost completely overshadowed the relevant conversation on the potential socio-economic impact the resurgent technology might have in developing countries. While such discourse’s subtle agenda, apparently now failing, Read more

Greater “AI for Good”

22 January 202114 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Governance, ICTD, Inequality
The proliferation of top, best, fails and prediction posts on almost any topic is now a staple of the annual transition from one year to the next. As the new year starts seeing the light of day, we seem compelled Read more

Better “AI for Good”

12 January 202115 January 2021
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Human Development, ICTD
While the dystopian camp perceives digital technologies as a formidable, perhaps even unsurmountable threat to society, those on the other, much more optimistic side do not seem to get tired of repeating its almost countless benefits. The latter camp apparently Read more

Contentious Politics in the AI Age

15 June 20207 August 2020
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Economics, Governance, Human Development, ICTD, Inequality
Initially touted as revolutionary and progressive in the 1990s, the lightening evolution of digital technologies, running on the coattails of continuous innovation, has been accompanied by the rise of both extreme socio-economic inequalities and loud and widespread populism, nationalism and Read more

Deep Learning and Breast Cancer: Improving Detection?

15 January 20204 February 2020
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, ICTD
A recent paper published under the auspices of Google Health makes a case for using deep learning algorithms to improve breast cancer detection. The research has been positively received by most and widely publicized as yet another victory of smart Read more

Yet Another Global AI Index

10 December 201930 December 2019
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Human Development, ICTD
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) seemingly continues to permeate all interstices of society, measuring its undaunted progress in the age of data is more than a priority. In a previous post, I share some insights on the Global AI Readiness Index Read more

Blockchains and Food Safety

10 September 201915 February 2021
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Climate Change, Human Development, Innovation
Trade is one of the main trademarks of the globalization process. Nowadays, most countries exchange products and services regularly and use local comparative advantages to specialize in specific trade sectors and/or commodities. Food and agricultural products are important components of Read more

Measuring Artificial Intelligence Development

3 August 201920 October 2019
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, e-governance, ICTD, Innovation
In the last decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI), including siblings machine learning and deep learning, has been growing by leaps and bounds. More importantly, the technology has been deployed effectively in a wide range of traditional sectors bringing real transformational change Read more

Biased Artificial Intelligence

6 February 201914 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Governance, Innovation
A recent piece in MIT’s Technology Review nicely summarizes the issue of bias in AI/ML (AI) algorithms used in production to make decisions or predictions. The usual suspects make a cameo appearance, including data, design and implicit fairness assumptions. But Read more

Algorithms and Algocracy – II

10 December 201814 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Governance
In the previous post, I provided a simple definition of an algorithm to then explore its use in the digital world. While algorithms live from the inputs they are feed, digital programs such as mobile apps and web platforms are Read more

Algorithms and Algocracy – I

30 November 201814 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Governance, Robotics
While the concept of algorithms has been around for centuries, the same cannot be said about algocracy. The latter has recently gained notoriety thanks partly to the renaissance of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) and is frequently used to Read more

Uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence

20 September 201814 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Book review, Economics, Inequality, Innovation
In a world where perfect information supposedly rules across the board, uncertainty certainly challenges mainstream economists. While some of the tenets of such assumption have already been addressed – via the theory of information asymmetries and the development of the Read more

Learning about Machine Learning

15 August 201814 December 2022
Raul Zambrano
Artificial Intelligence, Innovation
A few months ago, as I was finishing a paper on blockchain technology, I received an unexpected comment on Artificial Intelligence (AI from here on in) from one of the peer reviewers. While addressing the overall topic of innovation in Read more
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