The Future of Resource Allocation in Third-World Countries

The great problem the “market” solves or is said to solve is the problem of resource allocation. Also known as the invisible hand the market seems to be able to meet all the needs of society. Resource allocation occurs when the market knows all the demands of a society and can cater to them with the most efficient supply. However, as you might have noticed this is not always the case, and the invisible hand can sometimes be not there at all.

Usually, resource allocation occurs in trade centers. Where traders bet on different companies and groups who are the “suppliers”. Trading allows humans a messy way to assign and determine the cost of items and services. This is because objectively speaking it is practically impossible to price something. This can be validated by the fact that mere pixels were being sold for millions of dollars in the name of NFTs.

Now the problem with third world countries is that people are simply not educated enough to even read or write. And without reading or writing the speed at which information can be preserved and spread is massively slow. This means that misinformation is always on the rise. This also means that important discussions on important issues are never had. Simply because there is a lack of medium.

First-world countries have the privilege of reading and writing information. Which allows them to propagate issues. To raise awareness for social causes. Literacy is the essential tool a society uses to become a society. And to not be literate is to not be a society at all. To function as a society one must have common goals, open discussions, and, communication at lightning speed. A problem in a first world country is solved immediately not because they are rich, but because they know exactly how much resources are going to be needed to meet the requirement.

Now obviously there are some problems where an infinite amount of resources could be spent because there are an infinite amount of problems to solve. Education, health, and Technology are probably the top three fields that can always need more resources. It’s always been hard to be able to tell which resource should be delivered to which problem. Because there are thousands of small problems, any system that is good and explaining and communicating these issues is going to be limited to that field.

For example, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools; are notorious for slowly becoming so complicated and so over-bogged with features that the learning curve becomes impossible to keep flat.

This is where the solution comes in. It’s not very shiny but I know it can get the job done. So you have a problem. You want to get your AC air conditioning fixed. You pull your WhatsApp app and send a voice note to the Magic Channel that receives your request. Now the magic app can:

1. Convert the audio into text.
2. Text can be fed into an AI to embed the context of the search i.e. the location, time, e.t.c. and give the query a nice searchable wrapper.
3. Now this text can be indexed if no suppliers are viable.
4. When a supplier comes and offers similar resources that could meet the requirement, then the client shares the contact details of the supplier.
5. However, if more suppliers are available then the AI can use various resources to rank and score the supplier and share the top K suppliers.

Now I’m sure there are a lot of ways of improving this system. For one, using AI to rank suppliers or problem solves is a resource-intensive task. Then I’m sure indexing is pretty complicated, especially given the multi-modal nature of the data.

This is certainly not an aha moment! But at least it was interesting enough that I wanted to write it down, so I guess that counts as something creative.

So AI for certain will vastly change the future, let’s see what it turns out to be.