Technological Pilot Meets Development Project in Tanzanian Rice Fields - A Process of Translation

• In Event: Artificial Intelligence in global perspective: inequalities, changing relations, governance - I

Abstract

Against the backdrop of food security, allegedly untapped agricultural potential and pursuing a Green Revolution for Africa, international NGOs remain important intermediaries for the transfer of agricultural science and technologies. Realizing the limited transferability of Western technologies to the Global South, they shift to “trial and error” approaches to generate adapted innovations. In this context the pilot project of the Spatio-Temporal Agribusiness Support System (STASS) conducted in a trial community in Southern Tanzania serves in this presentation to critically reflect on the adoption of AI systems in rural Africa.
Taking up Tilley’s idea of ‘Africa as a Living Laboratory’, I will show how the project attempts to “develop” both the community and the technology itself. Based on long-term ethnographic research concerning the application of the digital drone and satellite-based information technology, I examine the logics and (unintended) effects of translating a technological pilot into a development project. Focusing on changing actor constellations, knowledge productions and everyday practices in relation to the AI system reveals the inequalities embedded in mobile connectivity, information-based autonomous decision-making, and technology-led local problem-solving. Through such pilot projects AI systems are being adapted to expand their markets and algorithms to environments in the Global South, however, the ethnographic insights also point to how the rather neglected farmers still take advantage of the live laboratory by appropriating provided information as they see fit. This contribution highlights how experimenting for technological innovations and development reinforces inequalities, and yet AI systems do not necessarily act in an exclusive manner.

Author

• Astrid Matejcek