Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is betting big on metaverse in the hopes of riding the next technological wave. But is augmented reality the indispensable future he hopes it will be, or will the future’s large corporations crack the personal artificial intelligence assistant code - a super-app that will make life easier and more productive for everyone on the planet - before he does?

On the 10th anniversary of artificial intelligence’s first successful applications, Satyen K. Bordoloi trawls through the history of computing and AI, explains the resistance to the technology in the past, and predicts that every company once hostile to AI will have embraced it in the next few years.

Satyen K. Bordoloi examines the conceptions and misconceptions of the Middle East and North Africa regions to reveal how they have funded global artificial developments over the past decade, and how a growing AI ecosystem could change the region for the better, despite constraints.

"WHO is late to the party with AI in healthcare. But Satyen goes cover to cover with their report for The Yuan and despite its misses, comes out impressed wishing anyone with anything to do with Artificial Intelligence to read it. He urges WHO to update and expand it regularly & to use it as a springboard to guide the inevitable i.e. mass deployment of AI in medicine and healthcare."

After much delay WHO finally joins the Medical AI debate with a seminal report 'Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health'. The document is a must-read for anyone dealing with AI. Despite its brilliance, does it go far enough? Bordoloi reads it cover to cover and examines its strengths and more importantly, crucial weaknesses.

Poor nations cannot fund Medical AI companies but, what they lack in finances, they more than make up for in a good range and quantity of data. If data are the new oil, then the potential poor nations offer for learning about human diseases and biology is unadulterated gold.