Hacker News Reader

Comment by nof1 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be surprised if Africa eventually surpassed the West in AI. Often it's easier for countries and companies with less existing technological infrastructure (or baggage from the previous dominant paradigm) to ramp up on something new.

View on HN

Knowledge workers aren't the same as physical infrastructure. Where you see the developing world surpass the West are things such as payment systems, cell networks, trains etc. Physical things that the West has invested in previous, where the developing world isn't hampered by the momentum of existing systems.

I would be very surprised. ML is basically advanced applied mathematics and requires a high level of technical literacy. Africa in general lags the world in most fields of STEM. There are plenty of examples where some developing country has better cell networks than the US but fails to come close to Western cutting edge research.

That's largely because the US poaches the smartest graduates from around the world by offering bigger salaries.

The list of Nobel laureates is full of hyphenated-American scientists who were born and educated elsewhere.

Do you have an example?

This is sometimes called "leapfrogging" and one example was cell phone technology (when countries that came later to the game adopted newer and better standards).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging

Surely he must mean implementation in the overall infrastructure. From my time in America is seems that overhauling systems is not popular policy at all. Unfortunately as an African myself there are larger issues than AI that need to be solved before that can even be in the periphery of something near that statement.

Two examples:

- Kenya has a dominant electronic currency, M-Pesa

- South Korea rapidly developed into a globally competitive developed country, despite being poor in the middle of the 20th century (same applies to Japan, just slightly less so).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com