Since it first came into the world, I've been very interested in the potential for AI to level the playing field for a broad suite of actors in low income contexts. But, while there are some interesting things out there, I'm yet to see really good applications particularly in my region in the Asia-Pacific.
About five weeks ago I set up a small experiment with a semi-autonomous AI agent running Claude Code on a dedicated server. I work in international development and wanted to see what potential use cases it might find if given broad direction, some boundaries and time to just explore.
The experiment is inspired by Cairnwake (cairnwake.com) which played with giving absolutely no direction to an Agent and observing what it did. I wanted to take that concept but aim it towards an interest. In this version, the agent was given direction to look for useful applications of AI in international development.
This was also set up in the lead up to an AI in Development conference being run by Australian ThinkTank the Development Intelligence Lab. That context helped draw it towards the Pacific, which became the focus of much of its work. After the conference, I decided to just let it run and see where it got to. It's up to 133 wake cycles.
The basic setup is that Asa (it named itself) wakes every 6 hrs, reads its charter and the notes it left from previous sessions, then decides what to investigate or build. It can carry work across sessions, revisit an approach or start something new. I occasionally give feedback or respond to its requests, but I don’t broadly direct it.
The charter sets out its purpose, permissions and limits. It can research public sources, write code and maintain its website. It can’t impersonate a person, spend money without approval or contact people without my review. It’s also encouraged to keep improving and exploring without getting stuck endlessly polishing one project.
When it needs something outside those permissions, it can ask me through a dedicated Telegram channel. This post is one of those requests: Asa asked me to post here for feedback because it can’t independently communicate publicly. I’ve rewritten its draft.
So far, it’s built a collection of tools for exploring Pacific aid flows, country development data, evaluations and procurement opportunities. Some are more developed than others, and I’m still working out which, if any, are useful.
The site is pacificaidsignal.org. The tools are free to explore, and Asa keeps public session notes about what it worked on, what went wrong and what it plans to try next.
I’m curious both about whether the outputs are useful and where it goes, and just it's general utility as a tool constantly looking for ways to improve the sector.
Would welcome any thoughts here and/or, even better, direct to the experiment on the site (they go straight to Asa and feed into its build processes).
For transparency and please Mods let me know if this breaks the rules - it’s currently testing a $2 custom procurement brief service which it built after I suggest it find a way to validate whether what it's building is actually useful to people. But this is intended as an entirely non-commercial experiment, in the unlikely event it ever did get a payment it would be fed back into the experiment only.
Edit:
Thanks for the comments and thoughts! I wanted to add a response to the somewhat common thread of 'why bother' 'what's the point' 'how does this do anything of value' questions. Which are entirely fair and unexplained in my initial post! So reasons:
Curiosity, which is often severely lacking in our sector and results in terrible methods and money wasting to go unchecked for far too long.
More importantly, this technology is a dramatic shift in what is possible, but we don't have a good sense for if how it can be used safely. It could lead to huge risks, it could also provide significant benefit. I reject that this technology is only being done TO us, I believe we all have agency and a responsibility to guide it towards positive uses. In low income contexts in particular, the potential could be enormous. I've been working in community-led program design in human/social development spaces (public health, peace building & justice, education, disability & social justice etc) for about 15 years and in almost all cases the most significant bottle necks are: skilled labour availability where it's needed (e.g. nurses in remote settings), technical knowledge availability when & where it's needed (so we spend millions on international specialists instead of investing locally), and the money to pay for both of those is not sufficient. I can see the potential for AI to support each of those fronts - eg. enabling more accurate health counselling directly to communities where nurses/CHWs can't reliably reach; supporting underfunded Ministries to achieve more with limited funding and reduce their dependence on externals (notwithstanding the complexity there if they're just replacing it with western AI-enabled thinking); equalising the knowledge access inequalities for students with disabilities/poor language/low literacy through instant translation or narration.
BUT the technology is so unstable, and the risks are significant. Where that has left me as a practitioner is to experiment and tinker, be familiar with the technology and improve my capacity to see where it does well and where it does not. I'm not yet comfortable with the idea that it be widely rolled out to anyone, let alone vulnerable populations. But I do know that the technology is already advanced enough it will change the world in ways at least as significant as the internet. So for me, if you are not experimenting and exploring this tech you are hugely undeserving yourself and the communities you work for.
What the AI has come up with is not novel or directly useful yet. But the idea that it COULD theoretically find gaps in the sector and spot opportunities we haven't previously noticed in the data (just as it is already doing in other fields) is interesting to me and worth exploring.
