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.
•
• •
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.
