A Harvard Financier, Jeffrey Epstein, Advances Artificial Intelligence in Ethiopia By When it comes to Sub-Saharan Africa, the media tends to focus on war, famine and disease. How can one not, when there are still such devastating crises throughout Africa, including the horrendous Ebola epidemic in Liberia. But it's not the entirety of Africa's story by a long shot. Such is the case for Ethiopia, landlocked between Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia and Kenya and long eclipsed by an appalling famine and war with Eritrea. A little is popularly known perhaps about Ethiopia's splendid 12'h century rock churches carved into the ground and caves in Northwest Lalibela, the plateaued Simian Mountains, the ancient city of Gondar, and of course, Lucy, its oldest hominid ambassador. But practically nothing is known about the technology emerging from its capital, Addis Ababa, and absolutely zilch about the flourishing of artificial intelligence. In fact, the computer science growth statistics for Addis Ababa sweep Silicon Valley, India and China into circuitry dust. Nothing was certainly known to an inscrutable New York private wealth manager, Jeffrey Epstein, one of the largest investors of individual scientists around the world including Stephen Hawkins, Murray-Gell Mann, Gerard t' Hooft and a host of other Nobel Laureates. Epstein was also the financial founder of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University, one of the first graduate departments to study the mathematics of evolution. A former board member of Harvard's Mind, Brain and Behavior Committee, Epstein's science foundation became increasingly involved in the marriage between neuroscience and artificial intelligence, working closely with Harvard's neuroscience branch, MIT Media Lab and MIT AI scientist Marvin Minsky. It was an impromptu meeting with computer scientist Jaron Lanier, a former graduate student of Minsky's and a pioneer in virtual reality technology that introduced t