Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

Remember when IBM’s supercomputer “Watson” played Jeopardy and won? Last month IBM announced that it is gearing up for “Project Lucy,” which will utilize Watson’s artificial intelligence, supercomputing capabilities to find solutions to “Africa’s grand challenges.”

Why call it Project Lucy? It’s named after the pre-homo sapiens female dubbed “Lucy” by the anthropologists who found her 40 years ago in the Great Rift Valley in Ethiopia.

What grand challenges? The scarcity of water, disease, poor agricultural production, need for education and health care, for starters.

Why IBM? Because Big Blue has staked its future on something it prefers to call “cognitive computing.” Others usually use the term “artificial intelligence.”

Kamal Bhattacharya, who is IBM’s research chief, says, “With the ability to learn from emerging patterns and discover new correlations, Watson’s cognitive capabilities hold enormous potential in Africa—helping it to achieve in the next two decades what today’s developed markets have achieved in two centuries.”

IBM plans to build “an ecosystem around Watson.” First there will be the pan-African Center of Excellence for Data-Driven Development to work with start-ups, development agencies and universities, giving them access to IBM’s big-data technologies.

At the University of Lagos, vice-chancellor Rahamon Bello foresees a great leap forward for Africa, in which it will “leapfrog” other economies.

First, though, Africa will join with those economies. The base from which the leapfrog will happen will be outside investments in science and technology, and economic planning integrated with those and “aligned to the African landscape.”

IBM and its enormous economic input will serve as catalyst, and will attract investments by other entities, or so the reasoning goes.

A heifer here, a heifer there (or a couple of goats, maybe) and pretty soon you have the herd shot ’round the world. (Sorry about that.) Those micro-loans, those little resource puddles of contributions from churches or clubs or charities can enable African families to feed themselves.

Scale that up a lot, and we have giant enterprises like IBM throwing technologies into the mix, to create self-sustaining systems and services..

How generous and noble! Well, I do think IBM could continue to do well without this initiative, but I also believe IBM will do very well from it.

Just so Big Oil, or American energy companies, spent tens of millions in, for instance, Saudi Arabia, back in the 1940s and 1950s. It did help Saudi Arabia. The American companies did very well for themselves too. Other countries in the region were favored with American investment, development and attention. But one view of those ventures is that the American companies exploited those countries, or their natural resources.

From what I am hearing so far, there is plenty in this venture for IBM, but IBM is not exploiting the African raw materials or resources for its own corporate benefit at the expense of the African peoples, nations or ecology,

IBM opened its first African research center in Nairobi in 2012. Since then there have been several additional “innovation centers,” including one in Nigeria.

One person who will be watching these developments with special interest, and from a closer vantage point, is Jim Mangold, our Don Mangold’s son, who has a fascinating project going on in Zambia, at a most amazing school.

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Sony has made laptops for years. Its line of Vaio notebooks has included some excellent models. I can’t say I cared much for its netbooks, but then, I wasn’t a fan of that whole concept. Well, Chromebooks might be okay.

But Sony has excelled in other consumer electronics and entertainment gear. The company plans to do more with tablets and smartphones, too. So now it is selling its Vaio PC business to Japan Industrial Partners. Company spokespersons say this will allow it to concentrate more on tablets and smartphones.

What about Sony TVs? It has had some popular models. Sony says it will focus more on high-end models, such as ultra-high-definition ones. Sony’s TV business will be turned into a wholly owned subsidiary and enhance its cost-cutting efforts. Hm. Downsizing, maybe?

Yes, apparently. Sony will shed about 5,000 jobs, including 1,500 in Japan.

Almost everybody making PCs is selling fewer of them. As for IBM, once the market leader, it doesn’t deal in those anymore. Lenovo is doing okay there, and Dell does sell desktops, laptops and servers.

Maybe they can get Watson to forecast the best places to put their money and attention.

Although I see that the reasoning ability of Watson is described as equivalent to that of a four-year-old human. Hm.