By Ian Ortega
We recently had a heated conversation with friends. It was about AI and whether it would flatten the world for those who previously didn’t have access.
If you imagined a Kid somewhere in Maseke, would AI place them on the same footing as another kid in Muyenga?
One of our friends argued in support. That for the first time ever, it was going to happen, AI was going to be an equalizer.
I joined those that argued on the contrary. I had the same illusions about the Internet and social media. But now that I am older and less wrong, there’s more at play in the world than the tools.
I started with the example of when the big universities offered access to their courses. From MIT to Harvard to Yale, they all came up with this open courseware. It turned out the constraint was not a lack of access. There was always more at play.
The discussion of course got heated and extended. We wondered, do underdogs stand a chance of success against established players? Could you with nothing but mere passion come around and disrupt an established player such as MTN? Could you tomorrow produce a new drink and disrupt Uganda Breweries or Nile Breweries?
We started to agree on some big things.
One of them was ecosystems/environments. You never rise past your environment. If you do, it is certainly because you are an outlier. One of our friends gave an example that he’d been educated in a slum school. We then as