Contemporary technoscience is rife with hype—inflated claims that rapidly propagate in favor of the next “new thing.” While scholars often strive to debunk and dispel hype, Tanzanian technologists working in health care face a different challenge: navigating hype. As these technologists embark on new projects in machine learning and other forms of AI, contending with hype becomes crucial. These actors operate on the margins of global technoscientific worlds, aiming to create novel African futures that promote technological sovereignty. To do so, they must grapple with hype and its political economy. For anthropologists, merely transforming these technologists’ experiences into an ethnographic object won't teach us much; a much more illuminating task is to examine how their work can provoke us to refine and transform our own knowledge practices. This is especially important because their innovations can seem both inspiring and dispiriting, both entrenched in and opposed to the troublesome technological global order.

中文翻译：

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 炒作的世界


当代技术科学充斥着炒作——夸大的主张迅速传播以支持下一个“新事物”。虽然学者们经常努力揭穿和消除炒作，但从事医疗保健工作的坦桑尼亚技术专家面临着不同的挑战：驾驭炒作。随着这些技术人员着手开展机器学习和其他形式的人工智能领域的新项目，应对炒作变得至关重要。这些参与者在全球技术科学世界的边缘运作，旨在创造促进技术主权的新颖的非洲未来。为此，他们必须应对炒作及其政治经济问题。对于人类学家来说，仅仅将这些技术专家的经验转化为民族志对象并不能教会我们太多；一项更具启发性的任务是研究他们的工作如何激发我们完善和转变我们自己的知识实践。这一点尤其重要，因为他们的创新看起来既鼓舞人心又令人沮丧，既根深蒂固又反对麻烦的技术全球秩序。