An optimistic fiction.
Chef de projet
“And now, let’s end all the other ones”.
This is the inscription carved at the foot of the statue of Fatima Konate, a Malian woman who, at the age of 29, lost her only son to malaria. The statue shows her breaking a small chain, in the same position as the one that made the headlines when the declaration of eradication was made on 6 July 2035 at United Nations headquarters.
The news invaded the networks. With her own momentum and the media spotlight, when the figures fell below 300,000 deaths, Fatima became the figurehead of the movement to eradicate malaria. Her message shook people’s hearts, and tens of millions of people from all over the world took part in ending the fight against malaria. Her message rallied the world as few had done in the past. A massive campaign blanketed Africa and South-East Asia with mosquito nets, chemopreventives and vaccines. In just two years, malaria was a thing of the past.
The statue of Fatima stands in a small square where there is a public water pump. The tool is obsolete, no one uses it any more, but everyone in her home village respects it as a relic of the utmost importance. Here, water is now available from the tap. It is healthy, and fortified with minerals to balance the health of the inhabitants.
In fact, it has become difficult to find food that is not nutritionally balanced. Whether it’s flour or ‘meats’ – usually plant-based alternatives indistinguishable from their meat counterparts – a portion of food carries with it just about all the daily requirements.
Bringing water into the village is no trivial matter. Both drinking water and waste water are closely monitored. In this small village, there is only one unit, but in Bamako, the capital, there are many “hydrolabs”, small units embedded in the pipes that monitor the presence of possible pathogens in real time. Following an isolated case of ebola a few years ago – detected thanks to its signature in wastewater – Bamako town council also installed Far-UVC lamps in half the shops and public buildings. They are switched off for the moment. But if there is the slightest virus, the public authorities can put them into service, and eradicate the tiniest pathogen from the atmosphere.
This modernisation is not isolated – in fact, Bamako was the last capital to equip itself in this way among hot countries. In terms of detection and prevention, there aren’t many cities left that can’t pride themselves on being able to stop pandemics before they even start.
The lamps are supplied with largely renewable electricity: the super-hot rock geothermal power station in Bamako covers 70% of its consumption. In a few years’ time, the construction of new fields of solar panels should complete the coverage.
This cheap and abundant electricity has its uses. There are people in the Malian countryside who still remember never having dared to dream of a washing machine or dishwasher in their youth. They remember their first cash transfer, which enabled them to set up a business and pay for their children to go to school, where they learned faster and better than they ever had before, thanks to teaching-at-the-right-level methods, and a complete eradication of lead exposure and parasites from their environment.
Parents were initially perplexed by the arrival of Artificial Intelligence in their children’s daily lives. The technology, still poorly understood, seemed to pose as many risks as opportunities. But this was without counting the regulations and decisions that soon followed in the United States, China and Europe – rather than developing it in a frantic race, the major powers decided by mutual agreement to set up a tripartite body to regulate its production.
Most systems today are Tool AIs, AIs that are specialised in particular tasks – the detection of pathogens in Hydrolabs is one example – but which are virtually impossible to misuse for malicious purposes. Prohibited uses are often detected on the hardware itself. Each use has its own supervision and specifications, and AI in education is no exception. No AI program in this environment can be used as anything other than a tutor, motivating students to learn skills, rather than delegating them.
The question of general AI is still on the table, but only as a follow-up to a more grandiose project in which Mali, along with every other country in the world, participated: the International AI Alignment Project. A major global citizens’ assembly is now held once a year to discuss and inform the values to be instilled in AI systems – the UK’s Safeguarded AI programme is drawing to a close, and more robust mathematical formulae are finally beginning to emerge that systematise the stopgap solutions hitherto found to secure the most advanced models.
The end of the exploitation of animals as a common value won over the assembly after several debates. Livestock farming is still practised in Mali, but in the rest of the world, what is meant by “livestock farmer” has evolved considerably. It’s more about producing alternative proteins. The idea of killing animals to eat them surprises people as outdated and cruel, unless they have no alternative. The idea of keeping them in cages doesn’t even cross their minds.
A few relics from the days when factory farming was in full swing still exist here and there: populations of a few hens or pigs that have returned to the wild, refuges where a few representatives of extinct strains of animals genetically selected for consumption still exist.
A few years earlier, these animals, which had returned to the wild, would have faced numerous infections and parasites, but the burgeoning field of wild animal welfare suggested just in time to vaccinate them and sterilise the carnivorous worm populations. The advice of animal specialists on cities is also being felt – most pigeon or rat populations are now regulated by gentle sterilisation, via food distributed on rooftops.
If you take the quotation out of context, you might think that by “all the others ones” Fatima meant the phrase “We have put an end to the malaria disease. Now let’s put an end to all the other ones”. And yet, before she broke the little chain that had belonged to her son, her words were hardly different. But they implied much more.
“We have put an end to one kind of avoidable suffering. And now, let’s put an end to all the other ones”.
This depiction is inspired by a LongView Philanthropy study which identifies how 2.3 billion euros could be allocated, the sum raised by asking the richest people to donate 10% of their income to impact charities.
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