Category: Human Development

A recent blog tackles the issues surrounding Africa’s digital sovereignty. It first defines sovereignty as a country’s capacity to independently create, develop, and govern AI. However, the supreme adjective I previously highlighted is missing from this definition. At any rate, the authors rightly emphasize that sovereignty comprises technical and political issues. On the technical side,…

In 2006, a British mathematician running a customer-centric data science company coined the phrase “data is the new oil.” At the time, the Open Data movement was taking its first baby steps, while the expected digital data tsunami was gathering steam expeditiously. The saying was meant to pinpoint that data, like oil, needs to be…

Like governance, sovereignty has existed much longer than the modern digital universe. Thus, it has a rich history evolving over several centuries (see references below). Historical consensus indicates that Jean Bodin was its conceptual father in the late XVI Century when the scourge of religious wars was dominating Europe. Treaties such as the 1598 Edict…

Back in 1993, I was leading a global program‘s developmental and technical components to connect developing countries to the Internet. Its core goal was to spread information on sustainable development following the UN 1992 Earth Summit agreements. The program started with a pilot in ten countries and eventually expanded to 50 across all regions. As…

A few months ago, I landed at New York’s JFK airport. Fortunately, my flight went smoothly and arrived on time in the early evening. After a long walk to the immigration booths, the cue lines were also extensive, as expected. Usually, arriving passengers are split into citizens, residents, and visitors (previously categorized as “aliens”). Diplomats…

As previously suggested, the three core information categories proposed by the Information Disorder Framework (IDF) — disinformation, misinformation and malinformation — are not orthogonal. Indeed, a given message can change from one to the other as it rapidly flows through the Internet pipes while trying to feel at home in noisy and warm data centers.…

While disinformation has been comfortably living in the beautiful and diverse geographies of the Global South for many decades, its grandchild, digital disinformation, is undoubtedly much younger, with not a single white hair yet visible. Indeed, digital disinformation is a 21st-century phenomenon, propelled by the emergence of the Internet and the seemingly unavoidable birth of…

From a philosophical perspective, the schism between symbolic and connectionist AI boils down to a question of epistemology, which, in turn, triggers additional ontological and ethical differences between the two—as mentioned in my previous post. How a computational agent learns is thus at the core of such a discord. Today, connectionist AI rules the world…

That Neural Networks (NNs) are the most successful AI in history is indisputable. Large Language Models (LLMs) resounding success has made that much more evident and incontrovertible. Curiously, most people do not seem to remember that NNs predated the term “Artificial Intelligence” by over a decade. Indeed, in 1943, a neuroscientist and a mathematician joined…