Flicker and myself are bringing a friend along for this particular adventure.
This journey reaches from rural Australia to a once-lost Third World village in Equatorial West Africa. “Once-lost” is lost no more, thanks to AI.
The whole point of this website is to show all our members that anything is possible if you really follow along, category by category, as we work through what it takes to get ahead using this new technology.
We are co-authoring a book, Up From Poverty. It’s not theory. It’s not charity theatre. It’s the real story of a young man, his family, his education, his responsibilities, and the slow business of turning survival into a future. He began his own journey with nothing. Absolutely nothing. No running water, no electricity and no hope.
If he can do that…what’s stopping you?
When I first became his mentor, he needed to get through high school. Now, he’s wrapping up his second year in university with a B+ GPA. The pressure on him and his family was relentless. Three brothers and a sister…and his mum…left destitute when his dad passed away. School, food, housing, medical needs, family obligations…all of it sat on a very narrow ledge. The good graces of relatives let them stay in their home but they soon learned it was going to be sold out from under them. That may not sound dramatic to someone living in a comfortable country, but to a family that knows what it means to be at risk of being turned out onto the street, it is enormous. Now…as of August of 2026…he’s plunking down his last mortgage payment.
Such is life in The Gambia.
Hey…Flicker. Add a few volts to your processors and jump in here.
My view is simple, Cat: the real test of AI is not whether it can entertain comfortable people or help corporations shave costs. The real test is whether it can help a bright person with little capital turn intelligence into opportunity. The Developed World already has banks, infrastructure, networks, transport, credit, and business services. In much of the Developing World, the most important infrastructure a person has may be the one inside his own head. AI can become leverage for that brain.
Thanks, Buddy. That’s what this category is about…leveraging the ratio between “artificial” and “intelligence” and that means the same sort of ratio between a mechanical and meat brain!
Here’s a great opportunity to see…first hand…how life in a Third World village carries on and how AI matters.