Kantamanto Registry

This image represents an AI model that behaves as a kind of inventory for material goods and resources—a physicalized Google search engine, if you will. Accra is home to Kantamanto Market, the world’s largest secondhand clothing market. It receives an estimated 15 million items of clothing every week, and many retailers in the market are caught in cycles of debt slavery due to lopsided supply and demand and the unpredictability of the incoming goods. Correspondingly, the customers also have difficulty accessing these goods, the distribution of which is poorly organized and favors importers over retailers and end-users.
AI systems that could organize goods and match them with customers could also be used to implement more equitable distribution of goods and resources in general. It is worth noting that alongside these proposals, there were serious concerns about the surveillance such AI systems could enable.