SingularityNET
Tackle the world hunger problem with local grains and AI
“We changed everything last night around eleven”, says Ibby Benali, team captain from the SingularityNET team. The team assigned themselves a new task, namely to solve world hunger, a big and ownerless problem. To achieve this task a lot must be learned, therefore SingularityNET first wants to enable an ecosystem to grow fonio, a grain indigenous to mid and west Africa, in the country of Chad.
“Fonio grows well in Chad and you could produce it in abundance”, says Ibby. “You can harvest it every six to eight weeks, but now people still harvest and peel it by hand. What you want to do is use artificial intelligence to create autonomous machines to help the people harvest more land.”
The team wants to achieve this by developing modular hardware which can be built by recycling used materials. By setting the system up as a shared community system, food can be produced without profit in mind. The modular AI-systems can power these modular machines which can eventually also be used to harvest other crops.
Ibby explains why they chose Chad: “A problem is Chadian citizens see their own food as inferior, while fonio is a very good product. It’s healthy, grows well close to the desert and is part of the local ecosystem already. They immediately tackle the problem that people in Chad rely on ‘western’ food. A nice addition is people become proud of their own products again, the food from their ancestors.”
“Another important part is the sharing of stories. When people in other countries around Chad see it is possible to produce their own food in abundance, others start believing in their own environment again. It’s also good for desert greening.”
The team works together with other teams on the Odyssey Hackathon, like Team Habari, which makes modular machines for protecting crops against climate change, and Team Oddys which builds a seed database. The latter can be used to connect knowledge for educational purposes for the people in Chad to learn how good their local grain is.
Ibby tells us about more partners, like the government of Chad and the Decentralized AI Aliance.
Hopefully this project can lead to less hunger in Chad and more pride in their own produce. Part of the solution is to use educational points in cities and towns, so people can learn from each other using a digital world to connect them and create communities.
Eventually it all comes down to rethinking finance. Aim for a wholeheartedly supported commons, an ecosystem towards abundance. In SingularityNET’s idea, crowdsourcing will be the main means of creating the solutions needed, for example:
1. Recycling partners that can donate their hardware trash to us to rebuild modular hardware systems for fonio farmers.
2. AI developers within the SingularityNET community that can contribute an AI service to help hardware systems perform food processing tasks better.
3. Teams at the hackathon, the United Nations, European Union, World Food Programme, World Bank, the Government of Chad, and many more organizations that can contribute their expert knowledge and enable the acceleration of the building of critical infrastructures needed.
