Uzair bin Farid

Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution will make it possible for developing countries like Pakistan to “reverse map” their economies so that their urban centres could regain their lost vitality. Over the past decades, rural populations in Pakistan have left their rural life in increasing numbers to find better prospects in the urban centres. However, lack of planning in the development of urban centres and big cities has turned them into outgrown slums. The number of people arriving from the rural areas is too much for the city centres to absorb sufficiently.

Resultantly, these incoming people find shelter outside the cities where they develop slums. Afterwards, when the aspirations of young and energetic youth are not fulfilled in moving into the cities, they get alienated of the system and can’t contribute positively. This outsized burden of Pakistan’s development pattern can be reversed using the concept of reverse mapping. The concept of reverse mapping will be easier to imagine with the help of the evolving tools and techniques of the AI technology.

Reverse mapping not only offers opportunities for youth in rural areas but also imagines a whole new lifestyle centred on organic farming, dwellings, embedded into the original design of nature, clean and green sources of energy generation, connectivity through the satellite internet, and supply chains centred on the transport of goods which are totally recyclable. Using the technologies of modern supercomputers and quantum computers, coupled with the advances in the printing technology like the use of 3D printers and the databases from which the AI tools take their learning cues, researchers and innovators will be able to develop alternative models of future growth and habitation.

The current paradigm of development and growth has resulted in such ominous unforeseen consequences that it has adulterated all the forms of nature. Be they human bodies, water bodies, air, ozone, pristine forests, coral reefs, underground aquifers, oceans, marine life, life on land, mountains, deserts, plains or anything else whatsoever, they have been polluted with microplastics and other forms of harmful chemicals.

Moreover, in the global south, this form of development has resulted in the deterioration of the whole face of civilisation. Reverse mapping requires a flight of imagination complemented with the application of modern scientific tools of data visualisation and model building. If enough will is garnered to change the shape and face of human civilisation in the global south, it will become possible through reverse mapping.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk