In another episode of “Balkans be silly” Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama recently announced that Diella, the “AI minister” based on Microsoft Azure, is “pregnant” with 83 “babies” – which are actually 83 AI assistants being created to support each member of parliament from the Socialist Party.
In this part of the world, we must be world-first in everything. Still, considering how we can’t be world-class in normal stuff like quality of life or handling actual corruption, we grab international headlines with chatbot fertility cult rituals and other such idiocies.
I’m pretty sure that no government official actually believes this computer program will be incorruptible, because an AGI/LLM, even with human oversight, couldn’t possibly handle procurements. But corruption is a hot topic in the domestic politics of places like Albania, where everyone is very much aware of how the place is being robbed blind daily. Albania had a period of terrible social unrest back in the 1990s, after a nationwide Ponzi scheme led to a popular rebellion, also known as the “Lottery Uprising”. The crisis was caused by the collapse of massive nationwide Ponzi schemes and prompted an international peacekeeping intervention known as Operation Alba, led by Italy and including Greece under a UN mandate.
The ruling Socialists probably think they killed two birds with one stone with this – address the corruption with the AI placebo, because “computers are incorruptible” and pander to a narcissist part of the electorate by being “world first” in something.
The fact that the avatar is dressed in a traditional female garment is not an insignificant detail – Balkan cannot shake off its hyper-conservative parochialism.
The anthropomorphization, the assigning of human qualities to computer technology, has always been an irrational reaction of the general public when they interact with it, but it has reached new heights with the advent of the so-called AI. A common person and many of the thought-leaders and influencers often refer to LLM/AGI computer programs as sentient, thinking, capable of complex processes such as lying or creativity. Nothing could be further from the truth – these are just vast databases of human knowledge with a rather smart automation and natural language user interface. They cannot be pregnant.
I remember when Rama became the mayor of Tirana; he was all over the news in Serbia. Many people in Serbia were so happy because there was this notion that when a generation of younger, more educated people takes over, there will be inevitable progress, and it will be a good role model for other countries. Fast forward to now and look at this mess.
Serbia also has its share of such nonsense.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic threatened staff at state institutions with arrest if their data is lost because they failed to store it at the government’s eUprava data center, N1 reported.
“He told the opening of eUprava (government’s electronic administration) House that arrests would be made if data is lost from state institutions such as the national power company EPS, the real estate registry, and other institutions which had been under cyber attacks and suffered power losses over the summer, ‘because staff were being clever (Serbian expression for being lazy and negligent) and failed to protect their data‘.”
Back in April, the Serbian government signed a contract with Eviden – the supercomputing unit of French IT firm Atos – to acquire a supercomputer, BullSequana XH3000, as part of a wider governmental agreement between Serbia and France signed in June 2024.
The total cost of the agreement is €50 million ($55m), with €36 million to be spent on the supercomputer and the remainder allocated for AI-focused projects across the healthcare, energy, transport, and government sectors.
The first national supercomputer was acquired in December 2021 for €2 million, with Nvidia supplying the hardware. It currently serves as the national AI platform for research and innovation.
Together, Eviden and the Serbian administration will deploy a National AI Factory – composed of an AI Center of Excellence and a leading AI-dedicated supercomputing platform – aiming to accelerate Serbia’s AI capabilities and foster innovation across key sectors while reinforcing its technological autonomy using European technologies, the Eviden Group said in its press release.
AI as a panacea for everything. The Serbian counterpart to the expression “monkey see, monkey do” is the saying “A frog saw the horse getting a horseshoe, so the frog also raised its legs”.
This AI factory is yet another in a long list of factories promised by this particular Serbian political class since they returned to power in 2012. In the populist vocabulary of the ruling Progressives, echoes of the long-gone times of socialist self-management in the former Yugoslavia are now repackaged as state capitalism, where every potential investment is a “factory” of some sort.
The microchip factory, the Chinese flying cars factory, the Chinese vaccine factory – all of those never materialized, and the entire product line of these high-tech Potemkin villages has been the content creation of memes and political satire making fun of Vučić’s portrayals of Serbia as an economic tiger and a leader of the region, which is experiencing a “golden age”.
The only possible investment missing now would be a factory of factories. Well, Serbia did have the Mechanical Industry Niš, but it declared bankruptcy in 2015. Ivo Lola Ribar isn’t doing so hot, either.
Serbianism 