Uganda: Ai @ 70 - How Uganda Is Embracing the Technology

The machine that decides the price of a Ugandan's airline ticket, helps a farmer detect pest damage or writes a student's essay has almost nothing in common with the room where Artificial Intelligence was born. Seventy years ago, a small group of scientists gathered at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, U.S. with an audacious proposition: that human intelligence could be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it. They could not have known how long the journey would take. Nor could they have imagined that, seven decades later, their experiment would reach a country thousands of miles away where artificial intelligence is becoming part of agriculture, finance, healthcare, education, aviation and government. Uganda is not where AI began but increasingly, it is where its consequences are being felt. But it all came together in 1956 when four scientists brainstormed on an idea: can machines think? John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon proposed bringing together researchers for what became the 'Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence', a gathering now widely regarded as the event that gave the emerging field both its name and its intellectual starting point. The workshop lasted about two months and became the…