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What If We Let AI Rebuild a Country?
I’m an urbanist who spends every waking hour thinking about how to make cities better. I’m famously analog, firmly believing that simple, analog solutions are the way forward. They are what get us through all the challenges we face: pandemics, warzones and climate change.
But here’s a thought experiment. What if we used AI to fix broken nations? A hard and fast intervention to get a dysfunctional country back on track.
Imagine this: instead of lurching from donor conference to donor conference, watching officials sip flat coffee while announcing billions in “pledges” that never arrive, we do something radical. We turn to AI.
I wrote a TV series proposal a while back about this topic but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, since I’ve been volunteering in Ukraine for three years. This nation could certainly use this approach, believe me. But for the purpose of this article, how about Lebanon?
I love Lebanon and in this thought experiment I chose it as the test case. A manageable size, insanely dysfunctional, a volatile region where inspiration would travel fast once things start getting fixed.
